Edited by

D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin

Philosophy of Religion

in the 21st Century

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

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Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion

General Editors: D. Z. Phillips, Rush Rhees Research Professor, University of
Wales, Swansea and Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, the
Claremont Graduate School, California; Timothy Tessin

At a time when discussions of religion are becoming increasingly specialized and
determined by religious affiliations, it is important to maintain a forum for
philosophical discussion which transcends the allegiances of belief and unbelief.
This series affords an opportunity for philosophers of widely differing
persuasions to explore central issues in the philosophy of religion.

Titles include:

Stephen T. Davis (editor)
PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE

D. Z. Phillips (editor)
CAN RELIGION BE EXPLAINED AWAY?

D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (editors)
KANT AND KIERKEGAARD ON RELIGION
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IN THE 21ST CENTURY
RELIGION WITHOUT TRANSCENDENCE?
RELIGION AND HUME’S LEGACY

Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (editors)
PHILOSOPHY AND THE GRAMMAR OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF

Philosophy of Religion in
the 21st Century

Edited by

D.Z. Phillips

Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion, Claremont Graduate University
and Rush Rhees Research Professor, University of Wales, Swansea

and

Timothy Tessin

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Philosophy of religion in the 21st century / edited by D. Z. Phillips
and Timothy Tessin.

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Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–333–80175–X (cloth)

1. Religion—Philosophy. I. Phillips, D. Z. (Dewi Zephaniah)

II. Tessin, Timothy. III. Series.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on the Contributors

viii

Introduction

Part I

Philosophical Theism

Philosophical Theism

Richard Swinburne

Philosophical Theology at the End of the Century

William J. Wainwright

Voices in Discussion

D.Z. Phillips

Part II

Reformed Epistemology

Reformed Epistemology

Nicholas Wolterstorff

On Behalf of the Evidentialist – a Response to
Wolterstorff

Stephen J. Wykstra

Voices in Discussion

D.Z. Phillips

Part III

Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinianism

Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Religion

Stephen Mulhall

Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Religion:
a Reply to Stephen Mulhall

119

Walford Gealy

Voices in Discussion

144

D.Z. Phillips

Part IV

Postmodernism

151

Messianic Postmodernism

153

John D. Caputo

The Other without History and Society – a Dialogue
with Derrida

167

Anselm Kyongsuk Min

Voices in Discussion

186

D.Z. Phillips

Part V

Critical Theory

191

Critical Theory and Religion

193

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann

Critical Theory and Religion

211

Maeve Cooke

Voices in Discussion

244

D.Z. Phillips

Part VI

Process Thought

249

Process Thought

251

John B. Cobb, Jr

Process Thought – a Response to John B. Cobb, Jr

266

Schubert M. Ogden

Voices in Discussion

281

D.Z. Phillips

Voices in Discussion

288

D.Z. Phillips

Index

291

Contents

Acknowledgements

I am happy to acknowledge the financial support given to the
Conference by Claremont Graduate University, Pomona College and
Claremont McKenna College. I am grateful to the participants who
contributed to the funding of future conferences by waiving their
claim to royalties. Administratively, I am indebted to Helen Baldwin
and Jackie Huntzinger, secretaries to the Department of Philosophy at
the University of Wales, Swansea and to the Department of Religion at
Claremont Graduate University, respectively. Graduate students helped
during the conference in transporting the participants to various
venues. They were organized by my able research assistant Richard
Amesbury, who was also responsible for typing my introduction and
the various ‘voices in discussion’. I am extremely grateful to him for his
help in this and other contexts. Finally, I thank my co-editor Timothy
Tessin for proof-reading the collection and for seeing it through its
various stages of publication.

D.Z.P.

vii

Notes on the Contributors

John B. Cobb, Jr is Professor Emeritus of Theology at the Claremont
School of Theology and of Religion at Claremont Graduate University.
He continues as co-director of the Centre for Process Studies. Among
his books are A Christian Natural Theology Based on the Thought of Alfred
North Whitehead, Christ in a Pluralistic Age, The Structure of Christian
Existence, Process Theology: an Introductory Exposition (with David
Griffin), The Liberation of Life (with Charles Birch).

Maeve Cooke is Senior Lecturer in the Department of German at
University College, Dublin. She is the author of Language and Reason: a
Study of Habermas’s Pragmatics and editor of a collection of Habermas’s
writings on language and communication: On the Pragmatics of
Communication.

John D. Caputo is David R. Cook Professor of Philosophy at Villanova
University. He is the author of The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida:
Religion without Religion, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: a Conversation with
Jacques Derrida, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the
Hermeneutic Project, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation
with Constant Reference to Deconstruction, Demythologizing Heidegger.

Walford Gealy was Senior Lecturer in the Department of Extra-Mural
Studies at University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the author of
Wittgenstein, written in Welsh, and co-editor of the journal Efrydiau
Athronyddol (Philosophical Studies). He is the author of over fifty arti-
cles, most of them being in Welsh, his native language.

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann is Professor of Philosophy at Goethe-
University in Frankfurt, Germany. His publications include Kritische
Theorie und Religion, Metaphysikkritik-Ethik-Religion (editor), Frieden durch
Recht (co-editor), and Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal
(co-editor).

Anselm Kyongsuk Min is Professor of Religion and Theology at
Claremont Graduate University. He is the author of Dialectic of
Salvation: Issues in Theology of Liberation. He is currently working on a
new theological paradigm, Solidarity of Others, as a theology after
postmodernism.

viii

Stephen Mulhall is a Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at New College,
Oxford. His recent publications include Faith and Reason, Heidegger and
‘Being and Time’, and The Cavell Reader (editor).

Schubert M. Ogden is University Distinguished Professor of Theology
Emeritus, Southern Methodist University. His most recent books
include Is There Only One True Religion or Are There Many? And Doing
Theology Today.

D.Z. Phillips is Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion,
Claremont Graduate University and Rush Rhees Research Professor,
University of Wales, Swansea. He is the author of The Concept of Prayer,
Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, Death and Immortality, Moral Practices
(with H.O. Mounce), Sense and Delusion (with Ilham Dilman),
Athronyddu Am Grefydd, Religion without Explanation, Dramâu Gwenlyn
Parry, Belief, Change and Forms of Life, Through a Darkening Glass,
R.S. Thomas: Poet of the Hidden God, Faith after Foundationalism, From
Fantasy to Faith, Interventions in Ethics, Wittgenstein and Religion, Writers
of Wales: J.R. Jones, Introducing Philosophy, Recovering Religious Concepts,
Philosophy’s Cool Place. He is editor of Swansea Studies in Philosophy and
co-editor of Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion published by
Palgrave. He is also editor of the journal, Philosophical Investigations.

Richard Swinburne is Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the
Christian Religion at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the
British Academy. He is the author of Space and Time, an Introduction to
Confirmation Theory, The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, Faith
and Reason, The Evolution of the Soul. Responsibility and Atonement,
Revelation, The Christian God, Is There a God?, Providence and the Problem
of Evil.

Timothy Tessin is co-editor of Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious
Belief. He is also co-editor of Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of
Religion and associate editor of Philosophical Investigations.

William J. Wainwright is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at
the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His publications include
Philosophy of Religion: an Annotated Bibliography, Mysticism, Philosophy of
Religion, Reason and the Heart, God, Philosophy and Academic Culture. He
is a former editor of Faith and Philosophy.

Nicholas Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical
Theology Emeritus at Yale Divinity School and was adjunct professor in
the Departments of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He is the author

Notes on the Contributors

of Works and Worlds of Art, Art in Action, Reason within the Limits of
Religion, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, Divine Discourse (1993 Wilde
Lectures at Oxford), Until Justice and Peace Embrace, Religion in the Public
Square, and World, Mind and Entitlement to Believe (1995 Gifford Lectures
at St Andrews) and Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology. He has
been President of the American Philosophical Association (Central
Division) and of the Society of Christian Philosophers.

Stephen J. Wykstra is Professor of Philosophy at Calvin College. He
has published articles in history and philosophy of science, and in the
philosophy of religion.

Notes on the Contributors

Introduction

D.Z. Phillips

The symposia and discussions presented here represent the proceedings
of the 1999 annual philosophy of religion conference which took place
at Claremont Graduate University. Previous publications in the series
Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion are: Philosophy and the
Grammar of Religious Belief; Religion and Morality; Can Religion Be
Explained Away?; Religion without Transcendence?; Religion and Hume’s
Legacy; and Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion. It was thought appropriate
in 1999 to prepare for the year 2000 by presenting a volume on the
present state of philosophy of religion. It was impossible to include
everything, so choice was made on the basis of movements which it
was thought had to be represented. On the other hand, the conference
was arranged with considerable trepidation, since there was always the
danger that the six philosophical schools would pass each other by like
ships in the night. The message in my Thai fortune-cookie, opened in
the closing banquet of the conference, would have summed up my
foreboding at its outset. It read, ‘You would be wise not to seek too
much from others at this time.’ For once my fortune-cookie was not
uncannily revelatory, since, as the discussions reveal, genuine attempts
were made to probe and explore difficulties connected with each point
of view. I am not going to rehearse these in this introduction. Instead,
I am going to single out a feature of the conference which struck me
most forcibly as its organizer.

The papers in the conference represent, not simply differences on

specific topics, but differences concerning the very conception of philo-
sophical enquiry. In one sense, it would be foolish to try to determine
the nature of philosophy since, descriptively, this would be a futile exer-
cise. Why insist that philosophy or philosophy of religion can only be
done in one way, when it is obviously practised in a number of ways?

It is tempting to take a tolerant attitude and simply say, ‘Let a thousand
flowers bloom.’ But, in another sense, that cannot be allowed without
denying a considerable part of philosophy’s history. This is because the
nature of philosophy is itself a philosophical question and great
philosophers have been critical of their predecessors’ conception of the
subject.

In the papers in this collection we are presented with marked differ-

ences in one’s conception of the tasks which philosophy of religion
can and should perform.

According to Richard Swinburne, philosophy of religion has, at its

heart, the rational assessment of religious beliefs. They are to be assessed,
as he would say any belief must, in terms of the probability of their
being true. Swinburne holds that the truth and rationality of religious
beliefs can be assessed in this way.

While William Wainwright is generally sympathetic to Swinburne, he

is sceptical about the efficacy of probability arguments for most educated
audiences today. This is because, he argues, we need a properly disposed
heart in order to assess the evidence. The vital issue, as Wainwright
recognizes, then becomes one of showing how these antecedent judge-
ments are related to the evidence on has to consider.

Nicholas Wolterstorff condones Reformed Epistemology’s rejection of

the Enlightenment ideal of a rational religion. Something does not
have to be grounded in order to be rational. As a result of a world-
transforming experience, the Christian philosopher in this tradition
offers, not a philosophy of religion, but a religious philosophy. Its aim
is to see all aspects of human life, intellectual and non-intellectual, in
the light of faith. It does not subject religion to the test of so-called
neutral evidence.

Stephen Wykstra wonders whether this rejection of evidentialism

itself comes from a too narrow conception of evidence, namely, inferen-
tial evidence. He finds the rejection unrealistic in a world in which faith
is challenged in many ways. It may not be necessary for an individual
believer to consider these challenges in detail, but unless someone in
the community does so, he argues, it is too easy to see faith as simply
burying one’s head in the sand. One is robbed of the much-needed
resources one has to turn to in face of these challenges.

Stephen Mulhall in expounding Wittgenstein on religion and

Wittgensteinianism, emphasizes the contemplative character of philo-
sophical enquiry. The main interest here is in giving a just account of reli-
gious belief by seeing to it that it is not confused with beliefs of another
kind. This interest itself has a demanding ethic and is connected, he

xii

Introduction

claims, with a certain kind of spiritual concern in the enquirer. This is
because we cannot be true to ourselves unless we are true to our words.

Walford Gealy emphasizes that some of Wittgenstein’s early remarks

on religion take the form that they do because of views of language he
held at the time and which he rejected later. This should be remembered
when these remarks are discussed. Like Mulhall, Gealy too argues that
the charge that Wittgensteinians hold that religion is immune to criti-
cism is absurd. Both writers give examples to counter this charge. On the
other hand, he insists that whatever is meant by spirituality in philo-
sophical enquiry, this should not be compared with religious spirituality.
Philosophy’s concerns come from its own problems and puzzlements.

John Caputo emphasizes postmodernism’s rejection of the

Enlightenment dream of universal reason. We must recognize that ‘rea-
son’ means something different in different modes of thought and at
different times and places. We must not seek a premature closure on
questions of meaning and value. Some have seen, in Derrida, a form-
less, chaotic, openness to everything in these emphases. Caputo denies
this and sees in Derrida’s openness a concern with justice for the other,
which involves listening to what we do not want to hear, the prepared-
ness to be surprised, and to take risks in such encounters.

Anselm Min is more sceptical about these latter claims, seeing in

Derrida, the constant appeal to openness as being uninformed by spe-
cific moral or political values. In emphasizing the impossibility of
arriving at a final statement of justice, something Min endorses, there
is the danger of the dream of the impossible turning us aside from the
actions that are required of us now.

Again, in expounding critical theory, Matthias Lutz-Bachmann

emphasizes its rejection of the objectifying tendency one finds in meta-
physics. Reasoning knows no absolute. Yet, Horkheimer and Habermas
want to invoke ‘the unconditional’ as a regulative ideal that calls us on to
improve the world, without any conception of a final goal. Religion may
assist this task at certain times, but this is a contingent fact. Religion is
replaceable by secular hopes for a better world. Lately, Habermas has
come to see that religious meanings may be sui generis, irreducible to
any secular substitute. Lutz-Bachmann argues, however, that as long as
Habermas bases human progress, not on values, but on what human
interests happen to be, he cannot avail himself of any positive concep-
tion of justice.

Maeve Cooke recognizes the tensions in Habermas’s thought which

Lutz-Bachmann emphasizes. He wants his conception of truth to be
pragmatic and yet absolute. It is difficult to see how religious truth can

Introduction

xiii

be accommodated in his system, she argues, because his criteria of vin-
dication demand publicly assessable evidence and a public agreement,
which is hard to imagine in the case of religious belief.

John Cobb emphasizes the way in which Process Thought calls the

assumptions of classical metaphysics into question. It argues that
‘becoming’ is more fundamental than ‘being’ and that ‘events’ are more
fundamental than ‘substances’. Following Whitehead, Cobb argues that
science is the most reliable guide to what we are given, as long as it is
not permeated by the assumptions of classical metaphysics. Religion
explores the more subjective side of human nature.

Cobb is sceptical about the possibility of neutral philosophy. For him,

any Olympian height is such within a system. Thus he acknowledges
that his Process system has its presuppositions and that these play a
vital role not only in the assessment of data, but in the very possibility
of seeing the data in a certain way.

Schubert Ogden insists that although philosophy is motivated by the

existential questions concerning the meaning of existence, it is not
constituted by them. Its task is to elucidate the necessary conditions of
human discourse, and to reflect on the meanings which discourse actu-
ally has. This latter task includes reflection on the distinctive claims of
Christianity, one in which philosophy and theology come together.
Ogden thinks that the existential questions and theological reflections
are furthered best in Process thought. On one central issue, however,
he differs from most Process philosophers and theologians. They,
Whitehead and Hartshorne included, treat the conditions for the possi-
bility of discourse, or ultimate reality, as though these were a further
super-fact. This confusion is found when myth is treated as a fact or
when God, as ultimate reality, is treated as though it were a fact. ‘God
exists’ is not a statement of fact.

It is clear from this brief survey of points of view represented in this

collection that there are wide differences between them in their con-
ception of philosophy. In some ways, the Wittgensteinian tradition of
contemplative philosophy seems an odd one out, but would claim to
be as old as Plato. In what sense does philosophy investigate reality? If,
like the Presocratics, we try to give substantive accounts of ‘the real’ in
terms of, for example, water or atoms, the problem arises of what account
can be given of the reality of the water or atoms. Plato came to see that a
philosophical account of reality cannot lead to answers of that kind. The
philosophical interest is a conceptual one; the question of what it means
to distinguish between the real or the unreal. Thus, on this view, philoso-
phy is not itself a way of reaching the substantive judgements, but an

xiv

Introduction

enquiry into what it means to reach conclusions of this kind. Unlike
Plato, Wittgenstein did not think that this question admitted of a sin-
gle answer. Hence his promise to teach us differences.

This perspective raises questions about Swinburne’s assumption that

all beliefs are matters of probability. Are all beliefs of the same kind? Is
belief in generosity the expression of a conviction or a matter of proba-
bility? Further, is it a mere probability that we had a Conference at
Claremont? If I could be convinced otherwise would I say that I had
miscalculated probabilities, or that I was going insane? Is trusting God
a probability?

William Wainwright is bothered, too, by some of these questions. He

emphasizes that we make antecedent judgements in terms of which we
see the data we are to assess. How are these antecedent judgements to be
understood? The suggestion that we can make them when our faculties
are working properly seems a lame analogy, since, normally, the notion
of ‘proper functioning’ is normative and, in that sense, independent of
the individual. Further, there is usually agreement on the notion of
proper functioning, as the case of eyesight illustrates. Is it like this in
the case of the clash between belief and unbelief?

There is another difficulty which relates to the contemplative concep-

tion of philosophy. If what can be seen is linked to the personal appro-
priation of the perspective in question, or to the ‘proper functioning’
of faculties, how is it possible to contemplate, and give an account of,
different perspectives? Further, someone who does not embrace a per-
spective may give a better philosophical account of its character than
one who does not embrace it.

In Reformed Epistemology a world-transforming religious experience

is at the root of the religiously orientated philosophical vocation to see
the world in the light of faith. Obviously, such a use can be made of
philosophy, or this is what philosophy can amount to for someone, but
what is its relation to the contemplative conception of philosophy? Can
it admit that a non-believer can give a better philosophical account of
religious belief than a believer? What sort of claim does a religious
philosophy make? Is it a theoretical claim? If something is seen in the
light of faith, how is that ‘seeing’ related to other non-religious ‘seeings’?
Can there be a philosophical interest in these differences which is not
a further form of such ‘seeing’?

In Postmodernism and in Critical Theory we have attacks on the

ambitions of a universal metaphysics, and a recognition of differences.
The question arises, however, whether in the ethical concerns of Derrida
or Habermas, an ethical insight is appropriated which cannot be derived

Introduction

from their philosophical critique. Having abolished a universal meta-
physics, there seems to be a desire to replace it with an attitude which
is equally universal even when it calls itself ‘open’ and denies the pos-
sibility of closure.

Again, in Process Thought, we have a similar attack on classical meta-

physics. This attack may be upheld in many respects, but questions may
be asked as to whether one set of ultimates, ‘becoming’ and ‘events’ has
now replaced another. Also, as Cobb admits, certain presuppositions are
brought to bear on the data in interpreting them and he denies the
possibility of a neutral philosophy. Does this mean that Process
Thought can argue against this possibility? If so, there is at least one
perspective it seems to deny when, at other times, it seems to recognize
a plurality of systems of interpretation. Ogden says that Process
Thought is the best theological system in answering central existential
questions about the meaning of existence. How would this be argued
in relation to different theological and atheistic perspectives? Are they
shown to be conceptually confused in some sense?

Ogden recognizes, along with Wittgensteinians, that the investigation

of the conditions of discourse is not an investigation of some super-fact.
On the other hand, he speaks of the necessary conditions of discourse.
Do they form a single class? He also speaks of God as ‘ultimate reality’,
and says that this, too, does not refer to a matter of fact. How is this
notion of reality related to the necessary conditions of discourse? Are
they the same? If so, as in the case of Reformed Epistemology, here,
too, we would have a religious conception of reality.

These questions are prompted by philosophical considerations which

are familiar to students of Wittgenstein, but questions can be asked of
Wittgensteinianism too. Is the analogy between language and games
an adequate one? After all, all games do not make up one big game,
whereas all language games occur within the same language. What
account is to be given of the unity or identity of language? Does that
lead back to a single account of reality? Without such an account is not
the sense of life and living compartmentalized in unacceptable ways?

The questions asked of Wittgensteinianism can and have been

addressed, for example, by Rush Rhees. No doubt the questions I have
asked of the other points of view can and have been addressed too.
I mention them here as questions with which the conference meeting
left us. Thus, this introduction gives an indication, not of where we
started, but of the points at which we would have liked to have gone on.

If philosophical enquiry is conceptual and contemplative, and recog-

nizes the conceptual variety in human discourse, no single account of

xvi

Introduction

reality can be given. The enquiry will be motivated by wonder at the
world and the desire to do justice to its variety in the account we give.
For others, this is the road to relativism and they seek a religious concep-
tion of reality which, in some way, can be shown to be more rational
than any secular alternative. Alternatively, there are those who argue
that although the sense of things is open to a change and development
to which philosophy cannot assign a closure, that development is itself
to be informed by certain ethical and political values.

Perhaps one major difference which needs to be explored is this: are

all perspectives on reality interpretations or expressions of interest, or
is there such a thing in philosophy as disinterested enquiry? Is disinter-
ested inquiry another interest, alongside others, religious and secular,
or is it a different kind of interest, an interest in the variety of those
religious and secular interests and the relation between them? Is an
Olympian view always one from within some system or other?

Many of the participants expressed the view at the end of the confer-

ence that we needed to address these issues further. If we did so in
another conference, perhaps its topic would be: Presuppositions.

Finally, a word is necessary concerning the ‘Voices in Discussion’.
These are notes I took in the course of the discussions which followed
each session. They do not purport to be absolutely accurate, although
I have aimed at reporting the course of arguments as closely as possible.
This is why the names of speakers have not been used. Readers of pre-
vious volumes have had some fun in identifying the speakers. In the
case of the participants this is not difficult because they begin each
discussion. Some reviewers were puzzled by the fact that the number
of speakers outnumbered the participants. This is truer than ever on
this occasion. This is because those who chair the session need not be
paper-readers. Also, at the end of each session discussion was opened
up to the wider audience present. Reviewers have welcomed ‘Voices
in Discussion’ as an addition to the collection, so I have decided to
continue this practice. No account has been taken, of course, of any
revisions made to the papers after the conference.

My major aim in the conferences I organize is to bring together

representatives of widely differing views, so keeping alive an older
tradition in the philosophy of religion which, sadly, has declined.
I only hope that the result of their discussions proves as valuable for
readers as it did for those of us who participated in them.

Introduction

xvii

Part I

Philosophical Theism

Philosophical Theism

Richard Swinburne

History of the programme

I shall understand by ‘philosophical theism’ the programme of giving a
clear coherent account of the nature of God (broadly consonant with
what has been believed about him by Christian, Islamic and Jewish
thinkers of the past two millennia), and providing cogent arguments for
the existence of such a God.

Providing arguments – or, more loosely, reasons – for the existence of

God has been a concern of many theologians of the Christian tradition
(over the whole of this period). St Paul’s comment that ‘the invisible
things’ of God ‘are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that
are made’,

gave Christian backing to the message of the middle chap-

ters of the Old Testament Wisdom of Solomon that the existence and
order of the Universe shows it to be the work of a divine creator. This
Biblical tradition merged in the Hellenistic world with the arguments of
Plato to the idea of the good and to the Demiurge, and with the argu-
ments of Aristotle to the existence of the First Mover. And so many
Christian theologians of the first millennium had their paragraph or two
summarizing a cosmological argument or an argument from design. But
it is normally only a paragraph or two,

and the reasoning is quick. My

explanation of why they directed so little energy to this issue is that they
felt no need to do more. Most of their contemporaries accepted that
there was something like a god; what the theologians needed to argue
for were the specially Christian doctrines about him.

But in the medieval west theologians began to produce arguments

for the existence of God at considerable length and with considerable
rigour; and they did their best to give a coherent account of the nature
of the God whose existence was purportedly demonstrated by these

arguments. The opening questions of St Thomas Aquinas’s Summa
Theologiae provide the paradigm of medieval philosophical theism. The
pre-Kantian Protestant tradition also had a concern with this activity –
more with arguments, than with clarifying the divine nature, and the
arguments tended to be less rigorous. The classical Protestants thought
that while there were good arguments for the existence of God, (or rather
more loosely, that nature showed clearly its creator) this was of little use
to humans corrupted by sin.

Liberal Protestants, by contrast, argued at

some length ‘from nature up to Nature’s God’ and thought their argu-
ments important. It was only with the arrival of Hume and Kant that
some major parts of the Christian tradition abandoned the project of
natural theology, and they were in my view ill-advised to do so.

It needs to be emphasized that none of those thinkers in the first

1750 years of Christianity who thought that there are good arguments
for the existence of God, thought that all or most believers ought to
believe on the basis of those arguments, nor that conversion required
accepting those arguments as cogent.

To be a Christian does involve

believing that there is a God, but most Christians may well have taken
God’s existence for granted. Most converts may have believed before-
hand that there is a God; their conversion involved accepting more
detailed claims about him. And if they did not initially believe that
there is a God, they may have come to believe on the basis of religious
experience in some sense rather than as the basis of natural theology.
Nevertheless, most Christian thinkers before 1750 held that there are
these arguments available, and that those who do not initially believe
that there is a God and are rational can be brought to see that there is a
God by means of them.

It is an interesting question why so much energy was put into the

project of philosophical theology in the medieval west, when one might
suppose that there was no more need of it than in earlier centuries –
there were no more sophisticated atheists around, one supposes. But the
answer, I suspect, is that there is a bit of the sophisticated atheist in
most believers, and St Thomas and Duns Scotus were providing tools
to deal with that. However, as we all know, atheism went public and
expanded in the eighteenth century, until in our day in the West a
large proportion of the population are atheists, and quite a lot of those
who practise a theistic religion have serious doubts about whether there
is a God. Yet the practices of the religion only have a point if there is a
God – there is no point in worshipping a non-existent creator or asking
him to do something on Earth or take us to Heaven if he does not
exist; or trying to live our lives in accord with his will, if he has no will.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

If someone is to be rational in practising the Christian, Islamic or Jew-
ish religion, he needs to believe (to some degree) the credal claims
which underlie the practice. These claims include as their central
claim, one presupposed by all the other claims, the claim that there is a
God. If someone does not believe or only half-believes, the faithful are
required (as part of their religious practice) to help. Help may take vari-
ous forms. If we can help someone to have a deep and cognitively
compelling religious experience, let us do so; but religious experiences
cannot be guaranteed. And the only way which requires the non-
believer simply to exercise his existing faculties in the pursuit of some-
thing which he is almost bound to regard as a good thing (to discover
whether or not there is a God), is to present him with arguments whose
premises are things evident to the non-believer and whose principles of
inference are ones he accepts, and to take him through them. And the
only premises evident to all non-believers are the typical premises of
rational theology – the existence of the world, its orderliness, the exis-
tence of human beings and so on. In our age, above all ages, theistic
religion needs to have available natural theology. And since the reasons
why people do not believe are not just the lack of positive grounds for
believing, but because they believe (or suspect) that there are internal
incoherences in the concept of God, or that the existence of suffering
disconfirms the existence of God, the believer needs to help them to
see that this is not so. There are other means which might have success
in our day – the need for philosophical theism is great – if in fact there
is a God.

But atheists are also interested in these questions, and they endeavour

to show that there is no God; and since showing that an argument is
not cogent or a concept is not coherent involves the same techniques as
the contrary endeavour, we may also call their activity ‘philosophical
theism’. And if, in fact, there is no God, it is good that some shall help
others to a right view of this matter, both for its own sake and also to
save them from spending their time in pointless activity.

Such is the history and utility of philosophical theology. How is it pur-

sued today and what are its prospects? A lot of very thorough, detailed
and rigorous work has been done with the aid of all the tools of analyti-
cal philosophy in attempting to clarify what would be involved in there
being a God, and attempting to show the claim that there is a God to be
coherent or incoherent. As regards positive arguments for the existence of
God, different philosophers of today have revived different kinds of argu-
ment from the past. Some have revived ontological arguments, either
producing variants of one or more classical arguments or producing

Richard Swinburne

some entirely new ontological argument. Ontological arguments of
course differ from all the other traditional arguments in that they start,
not from something observable, but from purported logically necessary
truths. It is easy enough to produce an ontological argument with the
premises evident to all; and easy enough to produce a (deductively) valid
ontological argument. But it is very hard indeed – in my view quite
impossible – to produce an ontological argument with both characteris-
tics. It seems to me fairly evident that the proposition ‘there is no God’
while perhaps false and even in some sense demonstrably false, is not
incoherent. It does not contain any internal contradiction. And if that
is so, there could not be a valid argument from logically necessary
truths to the existence of God. For if there were such an argument the
existence of God would be logically necessary and its negation self-
contradictory.

Then there is the tradition of attempting to produce deductively

valid arguments from premises evident to the senses. It is a not unreason-
able interpretation of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae 1.2.3. that he sought
there to give five such arguments. Those in our day who have sought to
give such arguments have for the most part tried to do so with the aid
of Thomist (or neo-Thomist) terminology. But the enterprise of produc-
ing such arguments is also, I think, an enterprise doomed to failure.
For if it could be achieved, then a proposition which was a conjunction
of the evident premises together with ‘there is no God’ would be inco-
herent, would involve self-contradiction. But again propositions such
as ‘there is a Universe, but there is no God’, though perhaps false and
even in some sense demonstrably false, seem fairly evidently coherent.

So my own preference is for the third tradition of natural theology.

This begins from premises evident to the senses and claims that they
make probable the existence of God. Such arguments purport to be
inductively cogent, not deductively valid arguments. Arguments of
scientists or historians from their data of observation to their general
theories or claims about the past or the future, also do not purport
to be deductively valid, merely inductively cogent. Thinkers were
not very clear about the distinction between inductive and deductive
arguments during the first one thousand years of the Christian era,
and not much clearer until the eighteenth century. So it would be
anachronistic to say that the patristic writers were seeking to give
inductive, or alternatively deductive arguments. But the arguments of
so many British empiricists of the eighteenth century, culminating in
Paley’s Natural Theology, do seem to me fairly clearly and intentionally
inductive.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Arguments against the existence of God of all three kinds have also

been produced in our day, but – for reasons of time – I shall concentrate
on the positive.

My own version

I model my own arguments for the existence of God on those of the
third tradition. Each of the various arguments from various observable
phenomena does, I argue,

give some support to the claims that there

is a God; and, taken together, they make it ‘significantly more probable
than not’.

I have sought to show this with the aid of confirmation theory

(that is, the calculus of probability, used as a calculus for stating rela-
tions of evidential support between propositions. I represent by P(p/q)
the probability of a proposition p on evidence q. I use Bayes’s Theorem,

P(h/e & k)

:P(e/h & k) ᎏ

(

)

ᎏ,

to elucidate the relation between the probability of a hypothesis h on
evidence of observation e and background knowledge k, and other
probabilities. To use this calculus does not involve supposing that exact
values can very often be given to the probabilities involved. That exact
values cannot often be given is evident enough even when h is some
paradigm scientific theory. It would be very odd to say that the proba-
bility of Quantum Theory on the evidence of the photoelectric effect
was 0.3217. Some probabilities can be given exact values – but this usu-
ally happens only when the probability is 1, 0 or 1/2. More often, all we
can say is that some probability has some rough value – more than this
and less than that, and that in consequence some other probability has
some other rough value – close to 1, or fairly high or less than that. My
concern has been to prove that when e is a conjunction of propositions
which set out the publicly available evidence which has been used in
arguments for and against the existence of God, and k is tautological
background evidence (viz. contains nothing relevant to h) and h is the
existence of God, P(h/e.k) is ‘significantly greater than 1/2’.

All that the calculus does is to set out in a rigorous formal way the fac-

tors which determine how observational evidence supports more general
theory. The relevant points can be made easily enough in words, but less
rigorously and with their implications less clear. What the calculus
brings out is that a general theory h is rendered probable by observa-
tional evidence e ( and if we put k as a tautology, we can now ignore

Richard Swinburne

it), insofar as (1) P(e/h & k) (the posterior probability of e ) is high, (2)
P(h/k) (the prior probability of h) is high, and (3) P(e/k) (the prior
probability of e) is low. The first condition is satisfied to the extent to
which you would expect to find e if h is true. Obviously a scientific or
historical theory is rendered probable, insofar as the evidence is such as
you would expect to find if the theory is true. (I can say ‘the theory is
rendered probable insofar as it yields true predictions’ but only if it is
understood that the ‘predictions’ may be evidence observed either
before or after the theory was formulated. It seems irrelevant to
whether evidence supports a theory whether it is ‘new’ evidence found
by testing a theory, or ‘old’ evidence which the new theory explains.)

However, for any e you can devise an infinite number of different

incompatible theories h which are such that for each P(e/h & k) is high
but which make totally different predictions from each other for the
future (that is, predictions additional to e). Let e be all the observations
made relevant to your favourite theory of mechanics – let’s say General
Relativity (GTR). Then you can complicate GTR in innumerable ways
such that the resulting new theories all predict e but make wildly diffe-
rent predictions about what will happen tomorrow. The grounds for
believing that GTR is the true theory is that GTR is the simplest theory.
P(h/k) means the a priori probability that h is true, or – put less
challengingly – is the measure of the strength of the a priori factors
relevant to the probability of h. The major such a priori factor is sim-
plicity. The simplicity of a theory is something internal to that theory,
not a matter of the relation of the theory to external evidence. Another
a priori factor is content – the bigger a theory, the more and more pre-
cise claims it makes, the less likely it is to be true. But we can ignore
this factor if we are comparing theories of similar content.

P(e/k) is a measure of how likely e is to occur if we do not assume any

particular theory to be true. The normal effect of this term in assessing
the probability of any particular theory h, is that e does not render h very
probable if you would expect to find e anyway (for example, if it was also
predicted by the main rivals to h which had significant prior probability).

For the purpose of applying this apparatus to assessing the theory

that there is a God, the philosophical theist needs to spell out what is
meant by this claim. God is supposed to be roughly a person without a
body, essentially omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly free, perfectly good,
creator and sustainer of any universe there may be, a source of moral
obligation, eternal and necessary.

It needs to be spelled out what each

of these properties amounts to, and to be shown that possession of
each is compatible with possession of the others. Inevitably, to talk of
the source of all being involves using words in somewhat stretched

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

senses – just as, in a humbler way, does talk about photons and pro-
tons. But it needs to be made to some extent clear just what the
stretching amounts to in each case, and to be made plausible that when
words are used in the stretched sense, the claims about God made with
their aid are coherent. It’s no good saying ‘all our talk about God is
metaphorical’. For if anyone is even to have a belief that there is a God,
let alone have grounds for that belief, there must be some difference
between that belief and the belief that there is no God, or the belief that
there is a Great Pumpkin, or whatever. And to explain to a non-believer
what that belief is, one must use words which she understands.
That involves making it clear when words are being used in stretched
senses and – insofar as it can be done – what are the boundaries of
these senses. The claim that there is a God may of course not be a
fully clear claim, but unless it is moderately clear, it cannot provide
backing for the practice of religion nor can arguments be given for or
against it.

I argue that any being who is essentially omnipotent, omniscient, and

perfectly free, and everlasting necessarily has the other divine properties,
and that the cited properties fit together in a very neat way so that the
claim that there is a God is a very simple claim, because it is a claim for
the existence of the simplest kind of person there could be. Persons are
beings with power to bring about effects intentionally, beliefs (true or
false) about how things are, and some degree of freedom to exercise
their power. God is postulated as a being with zero limits to his power,
to his true beliefs, and to his freedom. Scientists and others always pre-
fer on grounds of simplicity hypotheses which postulate one entity
rather than many, and entities with zero or infinite degrees of their
properties rather than some finite degree thereof. They postulate that
photons have zero mass (rather than some very small mass, equally
compatible with observations); and they used to postulate that light
and the gravitational force travel with infinite velocity (rather than
some very large finite velocity, equally compatible with observations)
until observations forced a different theory on them. Although the exis-
tence of anything at all is perhaps enormously improbable a priori, the
existence of a very simple being has a far higher prior probability than
does the existence of anything else (except insofar as the latter is ren-
dered probable by the former).

Yet if there is a God, it is not improbable that he should create a uni-

verse, an orderly universe, and within it embodied rational creatures such
as humans. For God being good will seek to bring about good things. It is
good that there should be a beautiful universe, Beauty arises from order
of some kind – the orderly interactions and movements of objects in

Richard Swinburne

accord with natural laws is beautiful indeed; and even more beautiful
are the plants and animals which evolved on Earth. It is a further good
that there should be human beings who can choose between good and
bad, choose whether to grow in power and knowledge, and so choose
whether or not to enter into a loving relationship with God himself.
Humans have limited power over their bodies and acquire naturally
some knowledge of how the world works. We have to know which bod-
ily movements will make what difference – and that involves there
being regularities in the world which we can grasp. The movements of
solid bodies in empty space follow (approximately) Newton’s laws.
Given such simple regularities, we can discern them and use them to
increase our power over the universe – to develop our agriculture, to
make houses and bridges, to send humans to the moon. So God has a
further reason to create a universe orderly in its conformity to rational
laws – in giving humans significant choices which affect themselves,
each other and their relation to God.

But unless there is a God, it is most unlikely that there would be a

universe at all. The universe is a big thing consisting of very many sepa-
rate objects of varying finite size and mass. That it should exist on its
own, uncreated, is therefore – by normal scientific criteria – very much
less likely than that God should exist. And it is most unlikely that the
Universe would come into existence caused by anything else than God,
because any other possible cause is much less simple than God. And it
is immensely unlikely that if there is a Universe, it should be governed
by simple natural laws. For natural laws are not entities. To say that all
objects obey Newton’s laws is just to say that each object in the
Universe behaves in a way that Newton’s laws state, that is, has exactly
the same properties of movement in reaction to the presence of other
objects, as does every other object. It is immensely unlikely that every
other object should behave in exactly the same way – a priori, unless
there was a common cause of their having the properties they do. And
any other possible cause is much less simple than God. (Even if you
suppose some impersonal cause to be just as simple a postulate as God,
there is no reason why it should bring about this sort of universe.)

So the hypothesis of theism satisfies the three criteria which I have

drawn from Bayes’s Theorem and are independently plausible, for the
probability of a theory. The only evidence which I have mentioned is
that of the existence of the Universe and its ‘conformity to natural
laws’. In my books I have also adduced much further evidence – the ini-
tial state of the Universe being such and the laws having such character-
istics as to bring about somewhere in the Universe animals and humans

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

(the ‘fine-tuning’ of the Universe); the existence of consciousness,
various providential aspects of nature, the public evidence about the
life, death and purported resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, other
reports of miracles, and the very widespread phenomenon of ‘religious
experiences’, in the sense of experiences which seem to their subjects
to be experiences of God. The case for the existence of God which I
have just summarized is a cumulative one from many pieces of evi-
dence. Arguments against the existence of God (for example, from evil)
have also to be brought into the equation, and it needs to be shown
that the hypothesis of theism retains its probability despite these.

Objections

What of objections? Ever since people have given arguments for the
existence of God, others have tried to find fallacies in them. There are
innumerable objections both to the general programme and to particu-
lar versions of it. I confine myself to objections to the arguments for the
claim that there is God, and – for reasons of time – shall not consider
objections to the coherence of that claim. I begin with objections to the
general programme.

First, there is the objection that if arguments for the existence of God

(and certain claims about what he has done) are cogent, then a prudent
person will try to do what is good out of self-interest – for (probably)
God will approve such behaviour and reward it. The total commitment
demanded by religious faith would no longer be virtuous. Kierkegaard
wrote that the suggestion that faith might be replaced by ‘probabilities
and guarantees’ is for the believer ‘a temptation to be resisted with all
his strength’.

Of course religion involves commitment, that is, living

by the assumption that the relevant religious system is true. But there
is always risk in a commitment to an assumption which may be false –
you may spend your life pursuing good things which you will never
attain, and lose good things which you could have attained. Yet if the
former good things are good enough – and plausibly the Beatific Vision
of God in the company of the saints for yourself and your fellows (as
well as many earthly good things) is good enough, it is a risk worth
taking. The prudence of seeking such a good, despite risk of failure, is
virtuous. And if it is probable (though not certain) that there is a God,
it is probable that you have a duty to commit yourself to God. But
there is nothing virtuous in living your life on an assumption which is
certainly false – for that is pointless. Given that there is some risk that

Richard Swinburne

there is no God likely to reward you, as the third tradition of argument
allows, this criticism fails.

Then there is Kierkegaard’s objection from the opposite angle, directed

at the third tradition of argument, that it would leave us with an uncer-
tain belief open to revision – and that religion requires more.

I do not

think that religion does require more – by way of belief. St Paul
reminded us that ‘we see in a mirror darkly; but then face to face: now
I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I have been known,’

and that ‘by hope were we saved: but hope that is seen is not hope: for
who hopeth for that which he seeth?’

Religion requires more than

tentative commitment, but there is no difficulty in giving that com-
mitment to a system which is only probably true.

Then there is the objection that arguments for the existence of God,

especially ones which involve probabilities, are sophisticated things;
and only intellectuals can understand them. Even if this were true, it is
no good objection to the project – intellectuals need their views on reli-
gion by which to live as much as does anyone else; and if their need
alone can be satisfied, that is something. But in fact I suggest that almost
all traditional arguments for the existence of God (apart from the onto-
logical argument) codify in a more rigorous form the vague feeling of so
many humans that the existence of the world with its various particular
features cries out for an explanation, and that God’s action in creating
and sustaining it provides that explanation. That feeling is then open
to various atheistic objections which can be dealt with in turn by more
rigorous formulation and defence.

Then there is the Barthian objection that philosophical theism has

too anthropomorphic a view of God. But the Christian view of God is
in crucial respects anthropomorphic. It is central to the Christian tradi-
tion (as to the Jewish and Islamic traditions) that God ‘created man in
his own image’,

and the very many theologians of the two Christian

millennia who have dwelt on these words have seen the ‘image’ as pri-
marily a matter of rationality and free will (and so of power and knowl-
edge), that is, properties contingently present in humans in a small
degree which are necessarily present in God in an infinite degree. God
is like man because man is like God. If we are to be concerned with
arguments for the existence of the God of Christianity, we must – with
all the qualifications about stretched language mentioned earlier – be
anthropomorphic about God.

There are many other general objections to the programme of philo-

sophical theism – I find, for example, eight separate ones, in Hume’s
Dialogues. But my view is that most such objections derive any force

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

that they may have from a positivism now largely rejected in philosophy
generally (and, in particular, in philosophy of science). There is, for
example, the view that causation concerns patterns of regularity in
observable objects, and there is no sense in talking of the unobservable
cause of a unique object. But while no object (even God) is unique in
all respects, all objects are unique in some respects; and science is
finding out rather a lot about the unobservable causes of the observ-
able. I think that there is little force in any of these general objections
to the programme of philosophical theism. What I believe to be much
more important are detailed objections designed to show that some
particular theistic claim is incoherent, or that all available versions of
theistic arguments do not work. If I am right in my claim that the
probability calculus captures the principles of inductive inference in a
precise form, then if someone can find a fault in my version of the pro-
gramme, that will suffice to render the whole programme worthless.

There are objections to each of my claims about the three elements on

the right hand side of Bayes’s Theorem, when this is applied to assessing
the probability of the existence of God (h) on the evidence of observa-
tion (e) and tautological background evidence (k). First, the objector
claims that P(e/h & k) is very low indeed, because of the problem of evil,
including pain and other suffering, which is very – if not totally –
improbable if there is a God. In my view the problem of evil consti-
tutes the most substantial of all objections to the existence of God. But
even to begin to meet it, my paper would need to deal solely with it. So
all that I have space to do here is to say that some evils are necessary
conditions of greater goods. It is not improbable that God will bestow
on some creatures not merely the good of pleasure; but the goods of a
free choice of good or evil which makes a significant difference to the
world, the opportunity to show patience, courage and compassion, and
the privilege of making it possible (by our suffering) for others to evince
these virtues, and much else. I claim that God (logically) cannot pro-
vide us with these good things without causing or allowing suffering,
and that it would not be wrong of him to cause or allow the suffering
for a limited period in a limited way for the sake of the goods which it
makes possible. But to show this at adequate length requires a very
substantial theodicy, for which I can only put down a marker.

Then, the objector claims that P(h/k) is low because the hypothesis

of theism is not nearly as simple as I suggest, and the hypothesis makes
such big claims (its content is so large). I do think that this is a very
substantial objection, although in the end mistaken. The content of
any hypothesis able to explain the existence of the Universe will have

Richard Swinburne

to be pretty large. The hypothesis of theism postulates one God of infi-
nite power, knowledge and so on, rather than one or many finite ones. In
the course of a very interesting paper Mark Wynn has pointed out that
there are very many different possible hypotheses, each postulating dif-
ferent numbers of gods with different powers, whereas there is only one
hypothesis postulating one God of infinite power. Hence, he claims,
although each of the former hypotheses might be less probable a priori
than the hypothesis of theism, the disjunction of the former is plausibly
more probable than the hypothesis of theism.

But if the order of the

world is to be explained by many gods, then some explanation is
required for how and why they cooperate in producing the same pat-
terns of order throughout the Universe. This becomes a new datum
requiring explanation for the same reason as the fact of order itself. The
need for further explanation ends when we postulate one being who is
the cause of the existence of all others, and the simplest conceivable
such – I urge – is God.

Finally there is the objection that we can pass no judgement on the

value of P(e/k). What possible factors could lead us to a view about
how likely it would be that there would be a universe, whether or not
there is a God? But that is easy enough to answer. The probability of e
is the sum of probabilities of the different ways in which e can come
about, that is, the sum of the probabilities of e on each rival hypothe-
sis, multiplied by the prior probability of that rival hypothesis. P(e/k)

P(e/h & k) P(h/k)

;P(e/h

& k) P(h

/k)

;P(e/h

& k) P(h

/k) … and so on.

By earlier arguments, all hypotheses of similar content which lead us to
expect e are much less simple than h. h

and the others are such that

P(h

/k)

P(h/k). Hence P(e/k) is not too much larger than P(e/h & k)

P(h/k). When we pass judgement on the probability of any scientific
theory for which there is no greatly relevant contingent background
evidence k, we pass just this sort of judgement.

Rival programmes

How has the programme of philosophical theism engaged with other
programmes represented at this conference? By far the closest prog-
ramme is that of Reformed Epistemology. Indeed, I do not regard it as a
separate programme, but rather as one end of a spectrum, of which philo-
sophical theism is the other end of a spectrum of programmes defending
the rationality of belief in a traditional Christian God (on a univocal
understanding of ‘rationality’). The canonical presentation of Reformed
Epistemology is the volume edited by Plantinga and Wolterstorff, Faith

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

and Rationality.

These writers, and all who have followed them, have

used all the tools of modern analytic philosophy, as have I and many
others who have tried to develop philosophical theism. What is central
to Reformed Epistemology is the claim that the belief that there is a God
can be entirely rational without being based on arguments from evi-
dence; it may be ‘properly basic’, the sort of belief which, like mundane
perceptual beliefs such as ‘I see a desk’, is rationally believed without being
based on other beliefs. I agree with that – belief that there is a God can
be, for some people, properly basic. And almost all philosophical the-
ologians of the past two millennia would think that too. So long as it
stares you in the face that some belief is true and you have no contrary
evidence, then that belief is properly basic, and if anyone today is in
that position with regard to their belief that there is a God, that belief is,
for them properly basic. But one difference between myself and many
Reformed Epistemologists is that in my view the number of people in
the western world in this situation in 1999 is fairly small. Most people
today need something by way of positive argument for their theistic
belief to be rational. But this difference concerns merely the utility of
the programme of Reformed Epistemology, not the truth of its doctrines.
Some Reformed Epistemologists however seem to be saying that there
are no good arguments for the existence of God – and there of course I
disagree for reasons given earlier in this paper. Sometimes also they seem
to be moving towards the claim that it is not rational to believe in God
on the basis of arguments; and of course here too I disagree.

Until 1986, the main claim of Reformed Epistemology was simply the

negative claim that the claim of others that ‘there is no God’ is not prop-
erly basic for anyone who had no good justification. Since then Plantinga
has developed his theory of warrant, warrant being whatever it is that
turns true belief into knowledge.

According to this theory a belief B is

warranted if it satisfies a number of conditions, the crucial one of which
is that ‘the cognitive faculties involved in the production of B are func-
tioning properly’,

and that means functioning the way your creator

intended them to function (if you have a creator), or (if you do not have
a creator) functioning the way evolution in some sense ‘intended’ you to
function. The application of Plantinga’s theory of warrant to religious
belief has the consequences that if there is a God, it is probable that
a belief that there is a God is warranted; and if there is no God, it is
probable that a belief that there is a God is not warranted. Even if this
conclusion is correct, it is of little use to us, unless we have reason to
believe that there is (or is not) a God, and that involves having a belief
about the issue which is rational in a different sense from Plantinga’s

Richard Swinburne

‘warranted’. In this alternative sense our beliefs are rational if they are
probable on the evidence available to us (which will include the appar-
ent deliverances of religious experience, as well as publicly available evi-
dence). The probability involved here is the logical or epistemic kind
with which I was operating earlier. The rationality of his or her beliefs
in this sense is something internally accessible to the subject and (to a
considerable degree) to everyone else as well. A reformed epistemolo-
gist needs to hold that theistic beliefs are rational in this sense, if he is
to justify his claim (to himself and the world) that they are probably
true. I hope that Reformed Epistemology, all of whose tools and many
of whose results I endorse, will recognize the need for this strong inter-
nalist kind of rationality and not saddle itself with an exclusively exter-
nalist epistemology.

How does Philosophical Theism interact with Wittgenstein?

Wittgenstein is of course one of the great philosophers of all time, recog-
nized as such by both the analytic and continental traditions of philos-
ophy. Any philosopher must take account of Wittgenstein; and I like to
think that I have learnt a little from him and applied it to one or two par-
ticular issues. As we know, he wrote very little directly about religion, and
his main influence on the philosophy of religion has been through the
application by others (and especially D.Z. Phillips) of what he wrote
about language in developing those few explicit remarks about religion.
The resulting position has often been called ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’.
Now the way in which I, or indeed most analytical philosophers,
approach some writer is to try to analyse what they have written in
terms of a few philosophical claims and various supporting arguments;
and then to attack or defend these claims by further arguments. To
approach any Wittgensteinian in this way can be a frustrating experience.
One is told that one’s account of the philosophical claims is far too naive,
and that to produce head-on arguments for or against such claims is a
naive way to deal with them. One is finally left with the impression that
one can only understand what the writer is saying if one endorses it.

My account of what D Z. Phillips has been claiming over many years

in fidelity to Wittgenstein’s few explicit remarks on the subject, is that
religion is a self-contained practice (of prayer, worship, public and
private conduct, and the way we think about things), commitment to
which involves no metaphysical or historical beliefs different from those
of people who do not practise the religion. As an account of the Christian
religion, as it has been practised by so many over two millennia, this
seems manifestly false. Of course there have been a few sophisticated
modern people who have gone through the motions of prayer and
worship, and taken Christian stances on particular moral issues, without

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

having any specifically Christian historical or metaphysical beliefs.
Some have even used the traditional language – for example, ‘Last Judge-
ment’ – in some ways utterly different from the ways of the normal
Christian. But to understand Christianity, it’s no good reading only
Simone Weil – you need to read St Paul, Irenaeus, and Gregory of Nyssa
and Luther and Francis de Sales and so on, and so on. Wittgensteinian
philosophy of religion suffers from a very one-sided diet of examples.
I know that there are differences between the writers I mention, but
they are as nothing compared with the difference between them and,
say, Don Cupitt. But having written this, I know that I shall be accused
of failing to understand the subtleties of language and religion; and
I await the accusation with due trepidation.

Then we come to Process Thought. I have always found the few writ-

ings of Process thinkers which I have read (despite the complexities of
Whitehead’s metaphysics), relatively clear. But they expound a meta-
physic which seems to me a lot less probable than a more traditional
Christian one. The attempt by Process Thought to dispense with the
category of substance seems to me to fail, in particular in its account of
persons. A subsequent person being me is not a matter of its causal rela-
tions or relations of similarity to earlier events. Many different series of
subsequent events could have very close such relations to the earlier
events which were mine. Yet – with immense plausibility – there would
be a truth about which series of subsequent events were mine. Being me
can, in consequence, only be analysed as being the same continuing
substance (that is, soul). The category of substance is unavoidable; and
one everlasting substance on which all depends is required to make
sense of the world. While in this way, like all philosophical theists,
I object to Process Theology’s conceptual scheme; unlike some philo-
sophical theists, I accept from Process Theology certain more particular
views about God. God is not outside time; and God does not know
infallibly the future free choices of creatures.

And finally what of Post-Modernism and Critical Theory? I am alas

too ignorant of critical theory to have engaged with it. In philosophy
generally I think of post-Modernism as the view that there is no truth,
there are just sentences expressed in different circumstances to which
people react in different ways and then utter more sentences; and I find
this view in the little I have read of Derrida. As I have read so little of
the Continental philosophy from which post-Modernism emerged, like
so many other analytic philosophers, what I have just written may be a
poor caricature; and, if so, I apologize – I am here to learn better.

But if post-Modernism is the view which I have stated, it seems to me

manifestly false. For how could it be a view, a belief about how things

Richard Swinburne

are, unless either it is true or it is false? And in that case there is truth –
either the truth of post-Modernism, or the truth that post-Modernism is
false. If the former, then post-Modernism contradicts itself; and hence
only the latter is possible. Now maybe post-Modernism is a bit subtler
than I have represented it. Maybe it claims that there are some truths
but not many. But it seems to me far more obvious than most things,
that a lot of modern science is true, that the world is very old, that there
are people beside myself and so on. These things are far more obvious
than any philosophical doctrine. We have an enormous number of true
beliefs. Post-Modernism may be warning us that different groups have
different criteria of rationality and that there is not one true set of crite-
ria. Although there are small differences between groups as to what they
take as evidence for what, I do not myself believe that those differences
there are greatly significant; humans have very similar criteria to each
other. This is a contingent claim and I could be wrong. But if I am
wrong, that does not damage my claim that there is one true set of crite-
ria. They are those of my group, which – I am quite sure – are those of all
who will hear or read this paper. We all have the modern scientific crite-
ria of what is evidence for what, and to say that we have these criteria is
just to say that we believe that the results which they yield about what is
probable to be correct results. If we thought that there are no true crite-
ria of what is evidence for what, we would think it just as likely that if
we jump from a window we will fly, as that we will fall to the ground.
Our conduct shows that we do not so think. One can however take a
post-Modernist view about religion without becoming susceptible to the
difficulties of a more general post-Modernism. One can claim that there
are no religious truths (because religious claims are incoherent), or that –
if there are – it is equally rational to hold any religious belief. The answer
to this more detailed claim (itself presumably purportedly true and
asserted as rational) is the detailed programme of philosophical theism
sketched earlier. Detailed challenges to the coherence of traditional the-
ism can be met; and it can be shown probable, and so more rational to
believe than its negation, by correct criteria of rationality.

Notes

1. Epistle to the Romans 1.20.
2. For a slightly longer form of argument from design for the existence of God,

and argument therefrom about the nature of God, see the opening chapters of
St John of Damascus, Exposition of the Orthodox Faith.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

3. See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, ch. 5.
4. Conversion of course involves not merely coming to believe certain propo-

sitions, but setting yourself to act on them in certain ways. But my concern
here is only with the former necessary but not sufficient element in conver-
sion. Hence I write of the person who does practise a religion as ‘the
believer’ and the one who does not as ‘the non-believer’.

5. ‘Not that the same method of instruction will be suitable in the case of all

who approach the Word … the method of recovery must be adapted to the
form of the disease … [It] is necessary to regard the opinions which the per-
sons have taken up, and so frame your argument in accordance with the
error into which each have fallen, by advancing in each discussion certain
principles and reasonable propositions, that thus, through what is agreed
on both sides, the truth may conclusively be brought to light. Should [your
opponents] say there is no God, then, from the consideration of the skilful
and wise economy of the Universe he will be brought to acknowledge that
there is a certain overmastering power manifested through these channels.’ –
St Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism, Prologue (trans. W. Moore and H.A.
Wilson, in Selected Writings of Gregory of Nyssa, Parker and Co., Oxford, 1893).

6. See my Existence of God, Clarendon Press, revised edition, 1990 (and the

short simplified version, Is There a God?, Oxford University Press, 1996).

7. In the Christian tradition God is ‘three persons in one substance’ – that is,

three persons each of whom has the listed divine characteristics – the Son
and the Spirit being eternally and necessarily caused to exist by the Father.
Arguments to the existence of God are then best construed as arguments to
the existence of God the Father, from which the existence of Son and Spirit
follow – in my view by logical entailment. The simplicity of God which
I consider in the text is the simplicity of God the Father – that a simple
theory has complicated consequences does not make it any less simple.
I ignore this complication in subsequent discussion, for the sake of ease
of exposition. For my own developed account of the divine nature see The
Coherence of Theism, Clarendon Press, revised editions, 1993; and The Christ-
ian God, Clarendon Press, 1994.

8. S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (trans. H.V. and E.H. Hong),

Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 11.

9. For reference to this objection of Kierkegaard both to natural theology and to

historical arguments about the life and teaching of Jesus, and for a developed
response both to this objection and to the previous Kierkegaardian objection,
see Robert M. Adams, ‘Kierkegaard’s Arguments against Objective Reasoning
in Religion’, in his The Virtue of Faith, Oxford University Press, 1987.

10. I Corinthians 13.12.
11. Romans 8.24.
12. Genesis 1.27.
13. I devoted two and half chapters of The Existence of God to theodicy (pp.

152–60 and chs. 10 and 11), but feeling the need for more extensive treat-
ment, have now written a full-length book on this – Providence and the Prob-
lem of Evil, Clarendon Press, 1998.

14. Mark Wynn, ‘Some Reflections on Richard Swinburne’s Argument from

Design’, Religious Studies 29 (1993), 325–35. Wynn points out that I need to

Richard Swinburne

make this kind of move in a different connection in order to defeat an
earlier objection of Mackie.

15. A. Plantinga and N. Wolterstorff, Faith and Rationality, University of Notre

Dame Press, 1983.

16. See Plantinga’s general theory of epistemology in Warrant: the Current Debate

and Warrant and Proper Function, Oxford University Press, 1993; and its appli-
cations to Christian belief, in Warranted Christian Belief, Oxford University
Press, 2000.

17. Warrant and Proper Function, p. 194.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Philosophical Theology at
the End of the Century

William J. Wainwright

Many writers have commented on the revival of philosophical theology
that began in analytic circles in the 1960s. Those of us who received our
training in the 50s were reacting to two things. First, our predecessors’
preoccupation with the question of religious discourse’s meaningfulness.
While not necessarily disagreeing with Basil Mitchell’s, say, or John
Hick’s responses to Antony Flew’s charge of ‘death by a thousand qualifi-
cations’, most of us lost interest in the debate. Second, a conviction that
Hume’s and Kant’s vaunted critiques of natural theology didn’t with-
stand careful scrutiny. On the positive side, developments in modal
logic, probability theory, and so on, offered tools for introducing a new
clarity and rigour to traditional disputes. Alvin Plantinga’s work on the
ontological argument, or Richard Swinburne’s use of Bayesian tech-
niques to formulate his cumulative argument for God’s existence, are
paradigmatic examples.

I have no quarrel with the main outlines of Swinburne’s account of

this development. Indeed, his own work is an exemplary instance of it.
I do, however, believe it is incomplete in five ways.

Swinburne doesn’t comment on the renewed interest in the scholas-
tics, and in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical theol-
ogy. Swinburne’s and Plantinga’s work has been less visibly affected by
this current. But Norman Kretzmann’s and Eleonore Stump’s work on
Aquinas, Alfred Freddoso’s and Thomas Flint’s discussions of Molina,
William Rowe’s use of Samuel Clarke, or my own examinations of
Jonathan Edwards are examples of an important strand in contempo-
rary analytic philosophy of religion. In each case, analytic techniques

are employed to recover the insights of our predecessors and apply
them to contemporary problems.

These historical inquiries were partly motivated by the discovery that

issues central to the debates of the 1960s and 70s had been already exam-
ined with a depth and sophistication sorely missing from most nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century discussions of the same problems.
Two examples will suffice. By the end of the 60s it was clear that reports
of the death of the ontological argument had been greatly exaggerated.
Charles Hartshorne and Norman Malcolm were suddenly not alone.
A spate of articles appeared attacking and defending modal versions of
the argument. Many were quite sophisticated. Yet an examination of,
say, Henry More, would have shown that the authors of these articles
were often reinventing the wheel. For an insistence on the superiority
of modal versions of the argument and the importance of the possibil-
ity premise (that a perfect being is logically possible), perfect devil
objections, and so on, are all found in More’s Antidote against Atheism.
More, however, is still not widely known among analytic philosophers
of religion, and his most important points were independently made
by contemporary philosophers of religion. Another example, though,
illustrates how historical studies sometimes advanced contemporary
discussions. Modern interest in the freedom–foreknowledge debate
was largely reawakened by Nelson Pike’s ‘Divine Omniscience and
Voluntary Action’ which appeared in The Philosophical Review in 1965.
Marilyn Adams proposed a solution to Pike’s puzzle which she (cor-
rectly) claimed to have found in Ockham, and Ockhamist solutions
continue to constitute one major response to the problem. Alvin
Plantinga offered another solution which turned out to have been
anticipated by Molina. Freddoso’s and Flint’s refinements of Molinism
are another popular resolution of the dilemma. With the exception of
the problem of evil, no other puzzle has so dominated journal litera-
ture in the past thirty years. It is therefore instructive that sophisticated
reconstructions of Ockham and Molina

have played an important role

in this debate.

Yet there is another and, I think, equally important reason for the

renewed interest in our predecessors. A significant number of analytic
philosophers of religion are practising Christian or Jewish theists.
Aquinas, Ockham, Maimonides, Clarke, or Edwards are attractive models
for these theists for two reasons. First, there is a broad similarity between
their approaches to philosophy and that of our contemporaries; precise
definitions, nice distinctions and rigorous arguments are features both
of scholasticism and of analytic philosophy of religion. But, second,

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

the work of these predecessors was self-consciously Jewish or Christian.
A conviction of the truth and splendour of Judaism or Christianity
pervades their work. They are thus appealing models for contemporary
philosophical theologians with similar commitments.

Swinburne’s characterization of the thrust of contemporary philosophical
theology (including his own important work) is inadvertently misleading
in at least one important respect. He focuses upon its attempt to
defend two theses: (1) That the concept of God is coherent, and that
(2) God so defined exists. These two concerns are, indeed, the thrust of
Swinburne’s own early work, and dominated discussion in the first
fifteen or so years of the period we are examining. Nor has interest in
these theses died out, or the last important word been said. (Recent
work on the evidential problem of evil by Rowe, Paul Draper, William
Alston, Peter Van Inwagen, and Swinburne himself are examples.) It is
nonetheless true that the interests of philosophical theologians have
broadened in a number of interrelated ways.

In the first place, the array of topics is much wider than an uninformed

reader of Swinburne’s paper might infer. Since the 1980s Christian philo-
sophical theologians have turned their attention to such specifically
Christian doctrines as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement.
The essays collected in Philosophy and the Christian Faith are one
example.

Swinburne’s own work on the Trinity and the Atonement is

another.

In the second place, many of these philosophers wish to do more

than defend the coherence and rational plausibility of the doctrines in
question. They are interested in their bearing on problems internal to
the traditions that include them. Thus, Marilyn Adams has argued that
Christian philosophers should explore the implications of Christian
martyrdom and Christ’s passion for the problem of evil. In her view,
suffering can be a means of participating in Christ, thereby providing
the sufferer with insight into, and communion with, God’s own inner
life. Or consider Robert Oakes, who contends that Isaac Lucia’s doctrine
of God’s tzimzum (withdrawal) casts light on the existence of evil.

Finally, a number of these philosophical theologians are convinced

that theistic doctrines can help solve problems in other areas of philos-
ophy. For example, Del Ratzch has argued that if natural laws are
regarded as expressions of God’s settled intentions with respect to the
natural world, that is, as descriptions of His habitual manner of acting,

William J. Wainwright

one can account for their subjunctive character (the fact that empirical
laws aren’t mere constant conjunctions, as Hume thought, but support
appropriate counterfactuals). Christopher Menzel has attempted to show
that numbers, sets, and other mathematical objects can be interpreted as
products of God’s mental activity, and that doing so illuminates them.
Robert Adams and others think that a suitably nuanced divine com-
mand theory can do a better job of accommodating two apparently
conflicting intuitions: that moral values exist in minds, and that
morality can command our allegiance only if it expresses a deep fact
about objective reality.

Swinburne’s account of philosophical theology creates the (perhaps unin-
tended) impression that its primary role is apologetic. Theistic proofs,
arguments for the necessity of the Atonement, and so on, are addressed
to non-believers, or to the non-believer in us (page 2). Yet if this is their
main purpose, their value is limited, and this for two reasons.

(1) Apologetic philosophical theology flourished in the early modern
period. One thinks of the Boyle lectures, for example, or of the work of
Samuel Clarke or William Paley. By the end of the eighteenth century,
however, apologetic arguments had lost much of their power to per-
suade educated audiences. Those who (like Coleridge and Schleierma-
cher) wished to commend religion to its ‘cultured despisers’ adopted
new approaches. Their repudiation of philosophical theology was no
doubt partly due to bad philosophy. (Kant’s critiques of the traditional
theistic proofs, for instance, aren’t clearly cogent.) It was also the result
of a zeitgeist which extolled sentiment and feeling and denigrated ‘mere
ratiocination’. But whatever the causes, the fact is that the arguments of
philosophical theology no longer produced widespread conviction in
most university-educated audiences (that is, in the very people who, by
education and training were, one would think, best qualified to evaluate
them). They thereby lost a large part of their effectiveness as apologetic
tools. Whether they have regained it seems doubtful. (Note that this is
not an argument against employing philosophical theology as an
apologetic tool. Rational arguments may persuade some, strengthen
the conviction of others, and convince non-believers that theistic
belief is not irrational.)

(2) A second reason for thinking that philosophical theology’s apolo-

getic value is limited is that it can’t produce faith.

Let me approach

this point by commenting on two observations of Swinburne’s. He

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

responds to the charge that cogent theistic arguments would only
persuade ‘a prudent person [to] try to do what is good out of self-interest’,
by asserting that the good, while probable, isn’t certain, and ‘the pru-
dence of seeking such a good despite risk of failure, is virtuous’ (page 9).
Jonathan Edwards, however, thought that prudence or enlightened self-
interest, like natural pity, isn’t itself virtuous although its absence is a
symptom of vice.

Charity, or true benevolence, is alone truly virtu-

ous.

Or consider Pascal who believed that a commitment based on

prudence alone has no intrinsic religious value even though it can lead
to action which produces genuine faith. Properly formed religious
beliefs are expressions of a heart transformed by God’s love. Prudential
calculations may induce people to place themselves in positions where
God will stir their affections, but they can’t do more than this. I believe
that this is correct, and that what is true of prudential arguments is
also true of the apologetic arguments of philosophical theology. They
can break down resistance to faith, and even produce belief.

But they

can’t produce the theological virtue of faith. Why not?

Consider a second comment of Swinburne’s: ‘Religion’ doesn’t

‘require more by way of belief’ than ‘an uncertain belief open to revi-
sion’ (page 9). Notice, though, that this is at variance with both
Aquinas’s and Calvin’s insistence on faith’s certainty. Thus, Calvin says
that ‘faith is not contented with a dubious and fickle opinion … . The
certainty which it requires must be full and decisive.’

Aquinas is more

careful. Even though faith is certain with respect to its object or cause,
it is not fully certain with respect to its subject. ‘Faith may accordingly
be said to be greater in one man than another either when there is
greater certainty and firmness on the part of the intellect, or when
there is greater readiness, devotion, or confidence on the part of the
will.’

But Aquinas, too, clearly thinks that either a lack of readiness,

devotion, or confidence on the part of the will or a lack of certainty
and firmness on the part of the intellect are theological vices. Merely
probable opinion isn’t sufficient.

Now, pace Aquinas, this certainty and firmness can’t be produced by

philosophical proofs. Calvin thought that ‘without the illumination of
the Spirit, the word has no effect’.

He would say the same, I think, of

natural theology.

My point, again, is not that philosophical theology

is useless but that its value is limited. A probabilistic conviction that
God exists, has certain attributes, and has acted in certain ways, isn’t
what the tradition has meant by the intellectual component of faith.
Faith involves a firm assurance of God’s goodness and favour towards
us, and this isn’t produced by philosophical theology.

William J. Wainwright

Theistic arguments can be used apologetically but other purposes may
be more important. For example, theistic proofs are sometimes used
to settle disputes within a common tradition. Udayana’s theistic argu-
ments were not only addressed to fellow devotees of Siva but to
Mimamsakas in his own Hindu tradition who interpreted the Vedas
atheistically. Again, al-Ghazali employed a version of the Kalam cosmo-
logical argument to show that Averroes’ and Avicenna’s interpretation
of the Quran was heretical.

But philosophical theology is also employed devotionally. Thus,

Udayana’s Nyayakusumanjali (which can be roughly translated as a
bouquet of arguments offered to God) has three purposes – to convince
unbelievers, to strengthen the faithful, but also to please Siva ‘by present-
ing it as an offering at his footstool’. Regardless of the success Udayana’s
arguments may or may not have had in achieving his first two goals,
they have value as a gift offered to God; their construction and presen-
tation is an act of worship. Nor is that fact that Anselm’s Proslogion is
cast in the form of a prayer accidental.

His inquiry is a divine–human

collaboration in which he continually prays for assistance, and offers
praise and thanksgiving for the light he receives. Anselm’s project as a
whole is framed by a desire to ‘contemplate God’ or ‘see God’s face’.
His attempt to understand what he believes by finding reasons for it is
simply a means to this end.

Swinburne wonders ‘why so much energy was put into the project of

philosophical theology in the medieval west when we might suppose
that there was no more [and perhaps less] need of it than in earlier cen-
turies’. He suggests that the answer may be that the medievals were
‘providing tools to deal with’ the ‘bit of sophisticated atheist in most
believers’ (page 2). I suspect, however, that the answer is quite differ-
ent, namely, that medieval philosophical theology wasn’t primarily
apologetic in intent

but was, instead, a tool for settling intramural

disputes,

and (most importantly) furthering the project of contem-

plation by helping the faithful understand what they formerly only
believed. The fact that philosophical theology seems to flourish best in
ages of faith suggests that that project may be its primary purpose.

The medieval project (inquiry as a means to contemplation) has
another feature that is especially prominent in Augustine and Anselm.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Emotional and volitional discipline are as necessary for its success as
intellectual discipline. Anselm’s inquiry, for instance, is punctuated by
prayers to arouse his emotions and stir his will. And this brings me to
the last way in which I think Swinburne’s picture of contemporary
philosophical theism is incomplete. It pays insufficient attention to the
bearing on philosophical theology of the epistemological turn in the
analytic philosophy of religion. Reformed epistemology’s defence of
the proper basicality of theistic belief isn’t the whole story. Linda
Zagzebski maintains that warranted beliefs are expressions of virtues.
C. Stephen Evans and Jay Wood suggest that faith may be a necessary
condition for appreciating certain reasons for religious belief. I have
argued that a properly disposed heart may be needed to appreciate the
force of the evidence for theistic belief. Reason and the Heart discusses
Jonathan Edwards’, John Henry Newman’s, and William James’s
reasons for thinking that it is. Pascal, I think, had a similar view. Pascal
believed that Christianity provides the best explanation of humanity’s
‘greatness’ and ‘littleness’, its wretchedness, and the ambiguity of the
theistic evidence. He also thought that there are good arguments from
traces of design, saintly lives, and the (apparent) occurrence of miracles
and fulfilled prophecy. This evidence is offset by instances of apparent
disorder, evil or wasted lives, and reasons for distrusting miracle reports
and prophetic claims, and so won’t convince everyone. Nevertheless, it
is sufficient to convince those who seek God or ‘have the living faith in
their hearts’.

I will not repeat the arguments of my book here but simply note two

relevant claims. First, what James called our ‘passional nature’ unavoid-
ably inflects our assessment of complicated bodies of evidence for ethical,
metaphysical, and religious propositions.

Since we can’t escape its

influence, claims to have dispassionately surveyed the evidence for
propositions like these are illusory.

Second, views like Edwards’s or

Newman’s or James’s or Pascal’s may be the only effective way of defus-
ing relativism. If there really are ethical, metaphysical, and religious
facts, and we have the ability to discern them, lack of progress and per-
sistent disagreement between equally sophisticated and well-disposed
inquirers

is surprising. In the absence of an explanation that is con-

sistent with the objectivity of truth and the reliability of our epistemic
faculties, relativistic conclusions seem called for. Views like Pascal’s or
Edwards’s provide such an explanation. If certain dispositions of the
heart are needed to reason rightly about religious matters, then deep
disagreements are likely even if the relevant truths are objective and
our epistemic faculties are reliable when functioning as they should.

William J. Wainwright

For some will possess the appropriate dispositions and others will not.
So in the absence of a better explanation, non-relativists have a power-
ful motive for thinking that some theory of this type is true.

The view I have just described is both similar and dissimilar to

evidentialist projects like Swinburne’s and to Reformed epistemology
(or, in any case, to Plantinga’s version of it). It is dissimilar to the first
because it denies that arguments like Swinburne’s are sufficient to per-
suade all fair-minded inquirers who have the necessary information
and intellectual equipment.

It is dissimilar to the second in its insis-

tence that the properly formed religious beliefs of mature adults are
typically based on evidence (albeit of an informal kind).

My inten-

tion here, however, is not to defend these views but to call attention to
the fact that the epistemological investigations of contemporary ana-
lytic philosophers of religion have a direct bearing on the enterprise of
philosophical theology. If they are right, an adequate account of its
persuasiveness or lack thereof must pay due heed to the heart.

Let me conclude with the point with which I began. I have no quarrel
with the vast majority of what Swinburne has said. He has accurately
described the thrust of much contemporary philosophical theology,
and his own work is an exemplary instance of it. I think, however, that
the contemporary scene is richer than his remarks might lead the
uninitiated to believe. I have attempted to explain why.

Notes

1. As well as of Aquinas and Jonathan Edwards.
2. Thomas V. Morris (ed.), Philosophy and the Christian Faith (Notre Dame, IN:

University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).

3. ‘Creation as Theodicy: a Defense of a Kabbalistic Approach to Evil’, Faith and

Philosophy 14 (October 1997); 510–21.

4. For Swinburne on faith see his Faith and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).
5. Vicious passions can blind us to our true interests just as they can sometimes

stifle pity.

6. Edwards more or less makes this point in The Nature of True Virtue, in Paul

Ramsey (ed.), Ethical Writings, Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 8 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), ch. 7.

7. Or, perhaps more accurately, a belief that God’s existence, say, or Christian

theism is more likely than not.

8. Institutes of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1957), Book iii,

ch. ii, no. 15.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

9. Summa Theologica, 22ae, Q. 4, A. 8, and Q. 5, A. 4.

10. Institutes, Book iii, ch. ii, no. 33.
11. And even Aquinas’s opinion on this point is more complicated than these

remarks suggest. He says, for example, that miracles and other external
signs aren’t sufficient to induce belief ‘for of those who see one and the
same miracle, or hear the same prophecy, some will believe and others will
not believe. We must therefore recognize that there is an inward cause
which moves a man from within to assent to the things of faith,’ ‘God,
who moves us inwardly by grace’. (ST 22ae, Q. 6, a. 1.) Aquinas thought
that philosophical theology was a science whose results were demonstrably
certain. Swinburne and I (and, I daresay, most contemporary philosophical
theologians) think its results are only probable. We also recognize that
many of our epistemic peers find our arguments unpersuasive. Shouldn’t
we conclude, then, that people’s relation to the theistic evidence is very
much like their relation to miracles and other external signs in Aquinas’s
view?

12. See Calvin, Institutes, Book iii, ch. ii, nos 15–16. Cf. Aquinas’s claim that faith

is ‘an act of the intellect as directed to one object by the will’ (ST 22ae, Q. 4,
a. 1). The intellect assents because the will deems it good to do so. So
Aquinas also thinks that faith involves a response to God as one’s good.

13. The philosophers argued that the world was eternal, and that texts like Sura

10 (‘Surely your Lord is God who created heavens and the earth in six days’)
should be interpreted in a way consistent with that fact. Given the Aris-
totelian framework within which the philosophers were working, however,
eternity and necessity are coextensive. So if God eternally creates the world,
He necessarily creates it, and hence doesn’t freely choose it. A God without
free will, though, isn’t a personal agent and so isn’t the God of theism. For
my remarks on Udayana and al-Ghazali I am indebted to John Clayton,
‘Religions, Reasons, and Gods’, Religious Studies 23 (1987): 1–17 and ‘Piety
and the Proofs’, Religious Studies 26 (1990): 19–42.

14. See, for example, Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (Richmond,

VA: John Knox Press, 1960); and Marilyn Adams, ‘Praying the Proslogion’, in
Thomas Senor (ed.), The Rationality of Belief and the Plurality of Faith (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1995).

15. Although it sometimes was. Thomas’s Summa Contra Gentiles is partly

directed towards Muslims and Anselm’s Monologion is addressed to the
‘ignorant’ as well as to his fellow monks.

16. Over the nature of God’s foreknowledge, for example, or the Atonement. Cf.

The disputes between Thomists and Ockhamists over foreknowledge, or
between Abelard and other medieval theologians over the nature of the
Atonement.

17. Pensées 242. For more on Pascal, see my Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed. (Belmont,

CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1998), ch. 6. See also Daniel Clifford Fouke,
‘Argument in Pascal’s Pensées’, History of Philosophy Quarterly 6 (1989): 57–68.

18. And not only for these propositions. In my view, our passional nature

affects almost all cumulative case reasoning.

19. Although, of course, we can (and should) eliminate obvious prejudice, be

open to new evidence and responsive to criticism, cultivate a sense of our
own fallibility, and so on.

William J. Wainwright

20. That is, between equally intelligent and well-informed inquirers who are

equipped by training to deal with the relevant issues, and who display all
the standard intellectual virtues (intellectual honesty, openness to criticism,
even-handed treatment of the relevant evidence, and so on).

21. Unless I misunderstand him, Swinburne thinks that dispositions of the heart

are, at best, only accidentally necessary to the success of the evidentialist
project. Accidentally necessary because, in particular cases, they may play a
causal role in eliminating prejudice, hostility to criticism, and other stan-
dard intellectual vices. In my view, dispositions of the heart are essential.

22. In my opinion, properly formed religious beliefs typically rest on inchoate

arguments of some complexity (and, in particular, on inferences to the best
explanation). Usually, however, these arguments aren’t carefully articulated.
The virtue of philosophical arguments like Paley’s or Swinburne’s is to make
these more or less inarticulate arguments explicit, and to defend them
against objections. My position on this issue has a certain similarity to
Jacques Maritain’s. Maritain argues that Aquinas’s five ways are a ‘develop-
ment and unfolding’ of a natural knowledge of God which consists of an
intuition of being, and a ‘prompt, spontaneous reasoning’ that is ‘more or
less involved in it’. (Approaches to God (New York: Collier Books, 1962),
ch. 1.) This view differs from Plantinga’s. Plantinga concedes that there is
little difference between himself and those who think that theistic belief is
the product of inferences from the glories of nature, the promptings of con-
science, and so on when those inferences are spontaneous, compelling, and direct
in the sense of involving few or no intermediate steps. In my view (and I think
also Maritain’s), mature religious beliefs may be (more or less) spontaneous
and compelling. But they are neither properly basic nor the result of simple
immediate inferences of the sort Plantinga describes. On the contrary.
Although the inferences may be implicit, and not fully articulate, they
typically involve assessments of rather complex bodies of evidence.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Voices in Discussion

D.Z. Phillips

A: We need impartial criteria by which to assess evidence for the truth
of the proposition ‘There is a God’. This evidence needs to be spelled
out. I take myself to be addressing a belief held by Christians, Jews and
Muslims. We need religion to be rational.

People come to religious belief in various ways. Some come to it

through a religious experience. Others believe on the authority of the
wise men in their community. These are perfectly natural ways of com-
ing to believe. But they are less available than they once were. There are
conflicting authorities and many have not had religious experiences. In
any case, logically prior to these is a claim that certain propositions are
true. How is this claim to be defended by an appeal to impartial reason?
There are three ways of doing so. The first of these is the ontological
argument according to which the statement ‘There is no God’ is self-
contradictory. Since the statement is clearly coherent, this argument
makes an impossible claim. The second argument is from the world to
God, but one which claims to be deductive. Aquinas argues that from
the fact that the world has certain features, it follows, deductively, that it
was created by God. But since it is clearly possible that the world was not
created by God, I cannot see that this argument works either. I therefore
prefer a third kind of argument from the world to God which is infer-
ential in character, but which is an inductive argument. I think it is an
argument which appeals to ordinary people when they are impressed
by the ordinary world as a marvellous place.

The effect of the evidence is cumulative. Various kinds of evidence

vary in strength. It is not an all-or-nothing affair. We will be satisfied
with a probability of more than a half.

Let me take but one example – natural laws. Why is there such a con-

formity? We must ask questions like: Would you expect a phenomenon

such as this if there were no God? If God is all-powerful wouldn’t you
expect to find order in the world? Order is a beautiful thing.

Of course, human beings have choices. They can make bombs to

destroy people, or grow plants to nourish them. But without order that
very choice makes no sense.

If there is no God you have no reason for thinking why the world

is as it is. My suggestion is that when you consider this question then,
as in science, you should go for the simplest explanation. I have made
use of Bayes’s theorem to show that probability is on the side of the the-
istic explanation. I believe this captures what ordinary people feel when
they look at the heavens and feel that this is the work of a personal
designer.

Some people have said that whereas I only offer probability, faith

demands certainty. Such certainty would be nice, but many are not so
blessed. So in practice, less than certainty is perfectly adequate. Live on
the assumption that theism is true.

Others have said that what I do is too complicated, but all I am doing

is giving a defence of a basic faith in face of the objections of others
against it.

B: I am in substantial agreement with A. I think that evidentialism is a
good project. Its arguments are generally persuasive and formulate, in
more precise forms, arguments which ordinary believers employ. So
I do not think that A is wrong, but incomplete. Let me note, therefore,
five ways in which I diverge from A.

First, I am sceptical about the extent to which A’s kind of argument is

effective with educated audiences today. Second, I do not think that
these arguments produce faith. As Aquinas, Calvin, Kierkegaard and oth-
ers have pointed out, certainty is a feature of faith. Jonathan Edwards and
the Puritans distinguished between historical faith , simply believing cer-
tain propositions about God, and faith as a gift of grace. In this respect, I
am more Augustinian and A is more Pelagian. Third, arguments were
used to settle intra-mural religious disputes. This would be a case of try-
ing to understand what is already believed. Fourth, A does not empha-
size, as Edwards did, the importance of a properly disposed heart in
assessing evidence which is, admittedly, public. These arguments con-
cern antecedent probabilities which enable one to demand less evi-
dence than one would do otherwise.

The question of how we make these antecedent judgements and of

how they relate to the evidence is a complicated one, but it is not a new
issue. I believe it is present in Plato’s ‘Seventh Letter’ in the emphasis

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

there on the importance of character and love of justice in judgements.
I think it is also involved in Aristotle’s account of moral reasoning. The
task is to extend these insights to other fields. These issues are clearly
important in historical judgements; for example, in what one thinks of
the behaviour of the Commune in Paris after the Revolution.

Fifth, a point I did not mention in my paper. There is some sign of

philosophers applying their analytic skills to non-theistic religions.
These religions offer competing examples of the facts of human experi-
ence. I believe it is incumbent on us to give the same attention to these
large competing world-views.

C: May I, at the opening of this first session, press A and B on their philo-
sophical methods? They are both happy with philosophy of religion
having an apologetic function. They are concerned with the truth of the
proposition ‘There is a God’. But there is a contemplative tradition in
philosophy which is concerned with the sense of things. Until we
know the sense of a proposition we do not know how to go about
assessing its truth or falsity. But it will be concerned with the nature of
‘truth’ and what disagreements look like. I have difficulty with the
accounts A and B have given of disagreement between believers and
unbelievers. A tells us that it is a difference in the assessment of proba-
bilities. For some scientists, for example, it is probable that the laws of
nature testify to a designer, while for others it is not. But isn’t that
itself an improbable account of disagreement? Scientists, who trade in
hypotheses and probabilities, who have been trained to do so, fail to
agree about the probability of belief in God even when confronted by
the same evidence.

Now B has an explanation for this or, at least, is attracted by one. The

faculties of unbelievers aren’t working properly. Locke said something
similar to explain the limitations in our knowledge, but Berkeley
responded by denying this. He said that we first throw up a dust and
then complain we cannot see. The fault is in our own conceptual confu-
sions. I think this of the analogy with faulty faculties. In the case of
eyesight, it is essential that the norm of normal eyesight is agreed on.
Thus, those who are colour-blind, or who have faulty eyesight acknowl-
edge these defects themselves. But this is not so in the religious context.
The circularity in B’s argument shows that the analogy doesn’t work. It
looks as though we are offered an explanation: people don’t believe in
God because their faculties are not functioning properly. What do we
mean by ‘not functioning properly’? That they don’t believe. Further, B
has to account for the fact that there have been philosophers who have

D.Z. Phillips

seen sense in religious belief who are not believers. On B’s view, how is
this possible? How do you respond to these methodological points?

A: I do want to say that the unbeliever is wrong. What stands in the way
of his agreeing with the believer? First, there is an obstacle in that people
do not like what religion asks of them, the way of life it demands, and
so they resist the probability which the evidence shows. So they aren’t
fully rational when they do this.

Second, as I have said, people in some societies come to believe by

deferring to wise men. This is true of our age where people defer too
soon to scientific opinion deemed to be wise. But these people may be
biased and so people are led astray in following them.

Third, let us not forget that disagreement about hypotheses occurs

within science itself. In the case of religious belief the matter is not
obvious and involves us in metaphysical speculation.

B: I think we must own up to the danger of intellectual phariseeism,
and be aware of the sinfulness of our own epistemic faculties. We can
blind ourselves to things and fall foul of self-deception.

We must also acknowledge that in our religious critique we are going

to appeal to metaphysical considerations. We must admit that we are
faced with a multitude of stories which interpret the facts – metaphysical
world-views. Of course we have to pay attention to evidence, but we
will always need to interpret it according to some world-view.

D: I am no friend of the ontological argument, but I think A is too
hasty in his dismissal of it. Things can seem coherent when they are
not. So although ‘There is no God’ may seem coherent, it may not be.

A: But I think ‘There is no God’ is obviously coherent.

E: Ontological arguments differ. Instead of dealing with logically neces-
sary truths in the abstract, Anselm is trying to bring out certain fea-
tures of the concept of God. He starts with that concept rather than
arguing to a logically necessary truth.

A: But the concept he starts with is of a being whose existence is logi-
cally necessary.

F: So the God you arrive at by inferred probabilities is a different con-
ception from that of Anselm?

A: Yes, he has the notion of a logically necessary being.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

F: I think you are leaving out the religious significance of what Anselm
is wrestling with – ‘that than which none greater can be conceived’.
This significance has been explored by thinkers like Levinas and
J.-L. Marion. In analytic hands, the ontological argument has become a
shadow of its historical self. It has been divorced from its religious
framework.

A: I don’t deny Anselm’s religious concerns. I am objecting to the way
he spelled them out.

G: A, what is the religious import of your project? We need to know
this probability, you say, in order for belief to be rational. It is supposed
to help, but what does it help?

A: Religion asks us to live in a certain way; it demands much of us. So
we need reasons to think that the practice of religion is worthwhile.
The more evidence we have the better. How much we need depends on
circumstances, but I’ve suggested that over fifty per cent probability is
enough.

G: Again, I ask: ‘enough for what’? What were believers doing before
they had your arguments to rely on?

A: I didn’t give them any new arguments. I simply knocked the ones they
already had into shape. I referred to Gregory of Nyssa in this respect.

H: I want to ask the same question as G. Anselm is explicating a faith he
had already. And your last response to G might suggest a similar posi-
tion. But your project makes a far stronger claim. It purports to start
from a neutral starting-point.

A: Where you start depends on the times and the state of the people.

I: One of the differences in our time is the plurality of plausibility-
structures. So people have searched for a critical and evaluative science.
How is that going to come from the analytic context?

J: For example, how is A’s appeal to simplicity supposed to work?

K: And even if the probability of a first cause is established, what would
that have to do with religion?

B: I don’t think it is just an appeal to simplicity. J is right to question that.
In large-scale metaphysical disputes criteria only work for those who hold
the metaphysical view in question. I confess to not being so interested in
the plausibility structures that I refers to, but I am interested in F’s point

D.Z. Phillips

about the relation of world-views or interpretations to the facts of
human existence.

L: That is an issue which can be raised in connection with all sorts of
reasoning, not simply religion. Sensitivity to context is important.

M: In that connection, I don’t think Aquinas was so much concerned
with proofs as with a theological science where first principles can be
used as principles of interpretation.

A: I certainly do not want to deny the importance of sensitivity. It is an
essential factor in being led in one direction by the data and not
others; for example, in being led to Christianity and not to some other
religion. On the other hand, despite the importance of contexts, remem-
ber that the one I appeal to is universal – our involvement in the uni-
verse and the desire to know how it came about.

H: But could a believer be atheistic with respect to theism?

A: I don’t see how he could.

C: I think he means ‘atheistic’ in the sense of denying the methods of
philosophical theism.

A: As I have said, you can believe on the basis of authority. But in the
absence of authority, or faced by conflicting authorities, we must have
reasons for embracing religious belief.

The point of religion is getting right with God. But this would have

no point if you did not believe that there is a God. You could have that
belief without any religious practice, but, nevertheless, in answer to K,
I do believe that that belief in God as a first cause is the same as that
held by ordinary believers in their religious practice.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Part II

Reformed Epistemology

Reformed Epistemology

Nicholas Wolterstorff

The assigned task of Professor Wykstra and myself is to state what we
regard as the most serious objections to Reformed Epistemology, and
then to assess whether, in our judgement, those objections have been
adequately met. It is our judgement, however, that so many objections
to Reformed Epistemology have been based on misunderstandings that
it is necessary, before we take up the assigned task, to explain what
Reformed Epistemology is. Accordingly, our papers will not take the
form of presentation and response but rather the form of joint presen-
tation: I will deal mainly with the nature of Reformed Epistemology,
although along the way I will deal with certain objections, and Professor
Wykstra will deal mainly with objections, although along the way he
will say something about the nature.

One might articulate the nature of Reformed Epistemology in purely

systematic fashion. On this occasion I instead propose doing so within
a narrative context. I have rather often been asked what led to the
emergence of Reformed Epistemology. I propose interweaving an artic-
ulation of the nature of Reformed Epistemology with a narrative of
its origins. Historians have a big advantage over philosophers in that,
whereas they always have stories to tell, philosophers only now
and then can tell stories. People love stories. Best then for philoso-
phers to tell stories when they can. But my reason for interweaving
narrative with analysis is not just that this will add spice to the
discussion. I think one understands better the nature of Reformed
Epistemology if one also understands its significance; and the best way
to understand its significance is within the context of an account of its
origins. Accordingly, I propose introducing my discussion with an
account of the origins, the nature, and the significance of Reformed
Epistemology.

Reformed Epistemology made its full appearance on the philosophical

scene with the publication in 1983 of the collection Faith and Rationality,
subtitled Reason and Belief in God, edited by Alvin Plantinga and myself.

For a good many years Plantinga and I had been teaching together in
the philosophy department at Calvin College. We had known each other
since the time when we were students together at Calvin, in the early
1950s. Around the mid-70s, Calvin began what it called The Calvin
Center for Christian Scholarship. The Center continues to this day; and
has by now acquired a very distinguished history in the promotion of
Christian scholarship. In its early years, the principal activity of the
Center consisted of adopting a topic for study each year, and then
assembling a team composed of a few Calvin faculty members, along
with a few faculty members from other institutions, to spend the year
working on the topic, free of teaching responsibilities. Each year a few
Calvin students were also part of the team.

The topic for the year 1979–80 was ‘Toward a Reformed View of Faith

and Reason’. Senior fellows for the year who were drawn from the Calvin
faculty included Plantinga and myself (along with George Marsden from
history, Robert Manweiler from physics, and David Holwerda from bib-
lical studies). During the second semester, George Mavrodes, from the
University of Michigan, joined us as a senior fellow. And throughout
the year, William P. Alston, then at the University of Illinois, and Henk
Hart, from the Institute of Christian Studies in Toronto, were adjunct
senior fellows who rather frequently dropped in for discussions. The
volume, Faith and Rationality, emerged from the work of the fellows
during that year.

Above, I described the publication of Faith and Rationality as marking

the ‘full appearance’ of Reformed Epistemology on the philosophical
scene. I meant thereby to suggest that earlier there had been an appear-
ance which was somewhat less than full. Or to put it in terms of
‘stages’: the publication of Faith and Rationality constituted the second
stage in the development of Reformed Epistemology. The first stage
came in two parts. One part consisted of some essays published by
Plantinga in the late 1970s and early 80s – in particular, ‘Is Belief
in God Properly Basic?’

The other consisted of a small book of mine,

Reason within the Bounds of Religion, published in 1976.

Behind each of these there was, in turn, a pre-history. The pre-history

of Plantinga’s essay, ‘Is Belief in God Properly Basic?’ was his 1967 book,
God and Other Minds, subtitled, A Study of the Rational Justification of
Belief in God.

The pre-history of my own book, Reason within the Bounds

of Religion, was an essay published in 1964, ‘Faith and Philosophy’.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Why do I say that these belong to the ‘pre-history’ of Reformed Episte-

mology, rather than that they constitute the first stage in its history
proper? Essential to Reformed Epistemology is the explicit rejection of
classical foundationalism, and of the evidentialist objection to religious
belief (realistically understood) which is implied by classical foundation-
alism. But in Plantinga’s book God and Other Minds, and in my essay
‘Faith and Philosophy’, there was no explicit recognition of classical
foundationalism, and hence no explicit rejection of it. Neither Plantinga
nor I had yet identified classical foundationalism as such; neither of us
had yet formed the concept.

In that regard, we were not unusual. It was only later that meta-

epistemology became a matter of serious interest to philosophers; and
only when it did become a matter of serious interest, sometime in the
70s, was classical foundationalism identified as one distinct style of
epistemology. Of course, classical foundationalism itself had been around
for centuries; what was absent, until the 1970s, was a clear recognition
of its nature, and a clear recognition of the fact that it was but one of
many options for epistemological theory.

It was the emergence of meta-epistemology, and the conceptualizing of

classical foundationalism which accompanied that emergence – indeed,
which that emergence made possible – it was that emergence and that
conceptualizing which made Reformed Epistemology possible. The
explicit use of the concept of classical foundationalism (sometimes just
called ‘foundationalism’) is what separates the first stage in the devel-
opment of Reformed Epistemology from its pre-history.

To say that the first stage of Reformed Epistemology had a pre-

history in some earlier writings of Plantinga and myself is of course to
suggest some sort of continuity between the pre-history and the first
stage. (I should state here, lest there be any misunderstanding, that there
is in turn a long pre-history behind those early writings of Plantinga
and myself.) What was that continuity? When a clear recognition of
classical foundationalism, for what it is, appeared on the philosophical
scene, by no means did everybody thinking about the epistemology of
religious belief immediately become a Reformed Epistemologist. Why
then did Reformed Epistemology emerge where it did?

Plantinga and I, from the time of our student days at Calvin College,

had been profoundly shaped by a movement within the Reformed-
Presbyterian tradition of Christianity; namely, the Dutch neo-Calvinist
movement of the late nineteenth century, of which the great formative
figure was the Dutch theologian, journalist, and statesman, Abraham
Kuyper. Our most influential college teachers were all ‘Kuyperians’.

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Faith seeking understanding was the motto held up before us as guide
and challenge for the Christian intellectual. The motto comes of course
from Augustine, who in turn took it from Clement of Alexandria.
I now know that the way we were taught to understand it was not,
however, the way Augustine meant it. What Augustine meant was that
the Christian intellectual seeks to understand those very things that
already he or she believes. What we were taught to understand by the
motto is that it is the calling of the Christian intellectual to conduct all
of his or her inquiries in the light of faith. Not to move from believing,
say, the doctrine of divine simplicity, to understanding that very same
doctrine – that would fit the Augustinian understanding of the motto –
but to develop history, sociology, philosophy, political theory, and so
forth, in the light of faith.

A striking feature of this way of seeing the challenge facing the

Christian scholar and intellectual is that nothing at all is said about the
need to develop arguments for one’s religious beliefs. The discussions
concerning faith and reason which have preoccupied the church down
through the centuries can pretty much all be classified as either discus-
sions concerning the proper role of reason in faith or as discussions con-
cerning the proper role of faith in one’s reasoning. In the Dutch
neo-Calvinist tradition, the attention was all on the latter. But that, of
course, implied something concerning the former. To urge that faith seek
understanding, while paying no attention at all to arguments for the
existence of God, to arguments for the reliability of Scripture, and so
forth, was to take for granted that the evidentialist challenge to religious
belief (more about this shortly) does not have to be met. It was
to take for granted that the fundamentals of faith do not typically need
the support of reasoning, of argumentation, for faith to be acceptable.
Plantinga, in his essay in Faith and Rationality, cites passages from the
Dutch neo-Calvinist theologian Herman Bavinck which say exactly that.

In short, it would only be a slight exaggeration to say that Reformed

Epistemology is a development that was destined to occur among
philosophers within the neo-Calvinist tradition once the concept of
classical foundationalism became clearly articulated.

So what then is Reformed Epistemology? It will be helpful to distin-

guish between Reformed Epistemology narrowly understood, and Reformed
Epistemology broadly understood. Let me here describe the former; later
I will explain what I have in mind by ‘Reformed Epistemology broadly
understood’. A preliminary observation is in order. Beliefs have a number
of distinct truth-relevant merits: warranted, reliably formed, known,
entitled, apt for inclusion in science, and so forth. Until rather recently,

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

twentieth-century epistemology in the analytic tradition was con-
ducted as if there were just two truth-relevant merits: justification, or
rationality, plus knowledge, this latter being understood as what
resulted when one added truth to a justifiably or rationally held belief
(alternatively: what resulted when one added truth plus some Gettier-
coping property). The main disputes were understood as being disputes
concerning the correct analysis of justification, or rationality. Though I
won’t here take time to argue the point, the situation seems to me
clearly instead to be that philosophers have implicitly been discussing a
number of distinct, though related, merits. The relevance of this point
concerning the multiplicity of doxastic merits for our purposes here is
that, strictly speaking, we ought not to speak of Reformed Epistemology
tout court, but of Reformed Epistemology concerning warrant, of
Reformed Epistemology concerning entitlement, and so on. At the
beginning, however, this point, about the plurality of doxastic merits,
was not recognized; Reformed epistemologists spoke almost exclusively
about rationality.

I can now explain what I take Reformed Epistemology, narrowly

understood, to be. In the Enlightenment there emerged the ideal of a
rationally grounded religion, the two great proponents of this ideal being
John Locke and Immanuel Kant. Religion as it comes, so it was said, is
not satisfactory; what it lacks is rational grounding. In Locke, it’s clear
that the individual believer is regarded as believing irresponsibly unless
his religious beliefs are all rationally grounded; in Kant, it remains
unclear how exactly the individual believer must be related to the ideal
of rational grounding.

Reformed epistemology is the repudiation of this Enlightenment

ideal of rationally grounded religion. Let it be said as emphatically as
possible that Reformed epistemologists did not repudiate the demands
of rationality (and now, after the recognition of the diversity of doxastic
merits, do not repudiate the worth and the demands of warrant, entitle-
ment, and so on). What they repudiated was the claim that, for a per-
son’s religious beliefs to be rational – in particular, for their beliefs about
God to be rational – those beliefs must in their totality be rationally
grounded. Rationality is not to be equated with rational grounding. The
way the Reformed epistemologists made this point was to insist that
some religious beliefs are rational even though they are held immedi-
ately. To say that a person holds some belief immediately is to say that
the belief is not held on the basis of other propositions that the person
believes, those other propositions functioning then as reasons for the
person’s beliefs.

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Notice that Reformed Epistemology does not say that every immediate

belief about God held by anybody whatsoever possesses the merit
under consideration. The claim is the much more guarded claim that
some of the immediate beliefs about God held by some persons possess
that merit. In fact the Reformed Epistemologist is of the view that for
every doxastic merit, there will surely be some persons who hold some
immediate beliefs about God which lack that merit. In some such
cases, the person will have defeaters for the belief – that is to say: there
will be something in the person or the person’s situation such that,
given that factor or situation, if the person were functioning properly,
he or she would not hold that belief immediately. The defeater, in
some cases, will be a belief of the person which is a reason against the
belief about God in question. Thus, contrary to what has sometimes
been said, Reformed Epistemology is most certainly not a species of
religious dogmatism.

Furthermore, the character or situation of many persons is no doubt

such that for some proposition about God and some doxastic merit,
their belief of that proposition could not possess the merit in question
without being held for (good) reasons. For some doxastic merits and
some propositions about God it may even be the case that no one could
believe those propositions immediately and their belief possess that
merit. And even when a person’s immediate belief about God possesses
the merit in question, the Reformed Epistemologist will normally not
see anything wrong in the person also holding that belief for reasons.
Reformed Epistemology is most definitely not opposed to offering
reasons for one’s religious beliefs. The Reformed Epistemologist is not
even opposed to all forms of what might be called ‘natural theology’.
But if someone claims that natural theological arguments are necessary
for any belief in God to possess some doxastic merit or other, then the
suspicions of the Reformed epistemologist will be ineluctably aroused.

Be it noted that Reformed Epistemology, narrowly understood, is an

epistemological claim – as indeed the name suggests. Reformed Episte-
mology has sometimes been criticized for its failure to give an account of
the nature of religious belief and of the role of religious beliefs in our
lives. Alternatively, it has sometimes been understood as aiming to give
such an account and then been criticized for giving a woefully inade-
quate account. One finds this latter criticism (perhaps also the former) in
D.Z. Phillips’s book, Faith after Foundationalism.

How much more

adequate, exclaims Phillips, is the account of the role in life of religious
language and belief which is to be found in Wittgenstein and his
followers. The ‘elucidation of religious concepts, giving a perspicuous

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

representation of them in their natural contexts, is neglected in favour
of the stark assertion of a believer’s right to place belief in God among
his foundational beliefs,’ says Phillips.

But Reformed Epistemology – and it makes no difference now whether

we understand it narrowly or broadly – Reformed Epistemology never
intended to be anything other than epistemology. It never aimed at
giving an account of the nature of religious language and belief; it never
aimed at describing the role of religious language and belief in the life of
the religious person. It is, and always intended to be, a contribution to
epistemology. (Though in many places one finds Reformed epistemolo-
gists making remarks about role – for example, in my introduction to
Faith and Philosophy.)

The mention of Phillips’s Faith after Foundationalism leads me to

mention another, connected, misunderstanding which inhabits the
first part of that book. In stating the core thesis of Reformed Epistemol-
ogy, narrowly understood, I spoke of a belief which a person holds
immediately. Call such a belief, an immediate belief. Plantinga, by contrast,
has usually used the term ‘basic belief’, rather than ‘immediate belief’.
And whereas I have said that we must distinguish between Reformed
Epistemology concerning warrant, Reformed Epistemology concerning
entitlement, Reformed Epistemology concerning aptness for theory, and
so forth, Plantinga has typically used the catch-all word, ‘properly’. Thus
Plantinga has typically conducted the discussion in terms of what he calls
‘properly basic’ beliefs. (He has also sometimes spoken of ‘taking’ beliefs
to be properly basic, when all he means – contrary to what a good many
commentators have supposed – is that they are properly basic.)

By ‘basic belief’ Plantinga means the very same as what I mean by

‘immediate belief’. The term ‘basic’ has certain connotations, however,
which the term ‘immediate’ does not have; and those connotations
have led to two all-too-typical misunderstandings. In the first place, the
term ‘basic’ suggests that the religious beliefs in question serve as the
basis, that is, the foundation, for one’s structure of warranted religious
beliefs, for one’s structure of entitled religious beliefs, or whatever. And
that has led a good many commentators to claim that the polemic of
Reformed Epistemology against classical foundationalism is misleading.
Reformed Epistemology is opposed, indeed, to classical foundationalism.
But it’s not opposed, so it is said, to foundationalism as such. It’s just
another version of foundationalism, a version somewhat more generous
as to what it allows in the foundations than is classical foundationalism.
All in all, then, so it is said, there is much less here than meets the eye.

But this is all a misunderstanding. Reformed Epistemology, narrowly

Nicholas Wolterstorff

understood, does not commit those who embrace this thesis to
any form of foundationalism whatsoever. To acknowledge that some
beliefs are held immediately, and to acknowledge that some of those
which are held immediately possess the doxastic merit in question –
that even some immediately held beliefs about God possess the merit
in question – does not commit one to foundationalism of any sort.
A coherentist could say as much. All foundationalists do in fact make
the mediate/immediate distinction. But they are not foundationalists
just by virtue of making the distinction; they are foundationalists by
virtue of what they do with the distinction in articulating their episte-
mologies. I’ll explain these somewhat dark sayings shortly, when I
argue that the positive epistemologies which the Reformed epistemolo-
gists have developed in the third stage of Reformed Epistemology have
in fact not been foundationalist in their basic structure. The thesis of
Reformed Epistemology narrowly understood, though it did not com-
mit the Reformed Epistemologist to foundationalism, did indeed leave
open that possibility; the Reformed epistemologists have not, in fact,
exploited that opening.

In the comparison by D.Z. Phillips of Reformed Epistemology

to Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion, in chapter 4 of Faith after Foun-
dationalism, one finds an additional misunderstanding of what
the Reformed Epistemologist has in mind by ‘basic beliefs’. Phillips
assumes there that the Reformed epistemologist has his eye on the same
thing that Wittgenstein has his eye on in On Certainty, when Wittgen-
stein talks about those beliefs that are certain for us because they are
‘held fast’ by all that surrounds them. Given the assumption that the
same thing is under consideration, Phillips then criticizes Reformed Epis-
temology for thinking of religious beliefs in such an atomistic fashion.

But I submit that the topics here are just different; ‘basic belief’ is

being used ambiguously. The phenomenon on which Wittgenstein had
his eye is that which Plantinga, in his essay in Faith and Rationality,
calls ‘depth of ingression’. Certain beliefs are so deeply ingressed
within one’s belief-structure that to give them up would require giving
up a vast number of other beliefs as well. The difficulty of doing that is,
then, what holds them fast. My belief that the world began quite some
time ago is one example of a deeply ingressed belief. So too, as one of
Wittgenstein’s examples suggests, is my belief that my name is
‘Nicholas Wolterstorff’.

Not only is the distinction between deep and shallow ingression just

a different distinction from that between immediate and mediate
beliefs; there isn’t even any coincidence between them. Some immediate

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

beliefs are deeply ingressed; some are very shallowly ingressed. Indeed,
it’s even a distortion of Wittgenstein’s thought to formulate it in terms
of beliefs. What Wittgenstein was pointing to is what we all take for
granted in so fundamental a way that, were we no longer to take it for
granted, we would have to alter vast stretches of our beliefs and prac-
tices. Some of what we thus take for granted will be things believed by
us; but much of it will never have been taken notice of sufficiently to
be believed. To what extent these ideas can be used to illuminate reli-
gious beliefs is an interesting question; I myself think that religious
beliefs are different in fundamental ways from the deeply ingressed,
unshakeable beliefs to which Wittgenstein calls attention in On Cer-
tainty. But in any case, what Wittgenstein is discussing is simply differ-
ent from what the Reformed Epistemologist is talking about when he
speaks of basic, that is, immediate, beliefs.

But why, then, does the Reformed epistemologist talk about what he

does talk about? Why all the flurry about immediately held beliefs about
God, and whether they can possess the doxastic merit in question? Why,
more generally, the preoccupation with epistemology? Why, in short,
doesn’t the Reformed epistemologist act like a good Wittgensteinian and
talk about the role of religious language and belief in life?

The answer is that the polemical partner of Reformed Epistemology,

narrowly understood, is not the same as the polemical partner of
Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion; and that the character of both
of these is in good measure shaped by their polemical partners and by
how they have chosen to deal with those partners. In each case, absent
knowledge of the polemical partner, the significance of the movement
is in good measure lost on one.

The polemical partner of Wittgenstein, in his reflections on religion,

was logical positivism. In his reflections on religion, Wittgenstein chose
not to challenge positivism’s criterion of cognitive meaningfulness head
on, nor its principle of demarcation between science and ‘metaphysics’
which made use of that criterion. Instead, he undertook to exploit a
concession which the later positivists had themselves already made,
namely, the concession that meaningful speech is not confined to fact-
stating speech. The challenge to which Wittgenstein addressed himself,
in his reflections on religion, was then to describe the ‘meaningfulness’
of religious language – given that, so he assumed, it does not serve to
state facts, that is, to make true–false claims. How does religious lan-
guage function – given that, so he assumed, it cannot be contradicted,
since nothing is said to which one can properly say, ‘That’s false.’
Wittgenstein’s way of dealing with his polemical partner required that

Nicholas Wolterstorff

he discuss the role of religious language and belief in life. There was no
other way to make his polemical point.

By the time Reformed Epistemology came on the scene, logical posi-

tivism was dead and buried. It wasn’t yet dead and buried at the time of
the pre-history of Reformed Epistemology; Plantinga does battle with it
at several points in God and Other Minds. But by the 1980s it was dead – at
least among philosophers. What was not dead and buried was a chal-
lenge to religious belief of considerably greater antiquity than the posi-
tivist claim that religious language lacks meaning – viz., the challenge
of which I spoke earlier, that religious beliefs, to be held rationally,
must in their totality be rationally grounded. Reformed epistemologists
have typically called it the evidentialist challenge. From the insistence
that religious belief is lacking in rationality, warrant, entitlement, or
whatever, if it is not held on good evidence, it just follows that it is
lacking in those merits if it is held immediately. This evidentialist
challenge has been so widely held among the intelligentsia of the mod-
ern world that it deserves to be regarded as part of the modern mind.
In response to the challenge, many have offered arguments for their
own full-blown religious beliefs; others have trimmed their religious
beliefs until they no longer go beyond what they judge the arguments
to support; yet others have contended that the arguments are so weak
that religious belief ought to be trimmed to the point of disappearance.
One way or the other, they have accepted the legitimacy of the chal-
lenge. The Reformed epistemologist, as I observed earlier, rejects the
challenge. In so doing he is, I suppose, a ‘postmodernist’ of a sort. What
made ‘postmodernism’ of his sort seem plausible to him, however, was
not immersion in the writings of Heidegger, Derrida, and their ilk, but
the ‘postmodernism’ which was implicit all along in the neo-Calvinist
movement which he embraced.

What emerges from the foregoing is that Reformed Epistemology

and Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion have in good measure just
been doing different things; there is no reason why each cannot regard
the other as having important insights which ought to be incorporated
within a larger picture. It appears to me that on one absolutely central
point, however, these two movements are in conflict. I understand
Wittgenstein and most of his followers – O.K. Bouwsma being the signal
exception – to hold that there is no such phenomenon as referring to
God and predicating things of that to which one has referred. Religious
language functions very much like the language of one’s atheist friend
when he exclaims, ‘Thank God it’s Friday.’ The Reformed epistemologist,
by contrast, holds that we can and do refer to God, and predicate things

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

of that to which we have referred. He furthermore holds that these asser-
tions about God are either true or false of God, and that they are true or
false of God because of the facts of the matter. I judge this to be the
decisive issue separating Reformed Epistemology from Wittgensteinian
philosophy of religion (Bouwsma excepted). I shall say a bit about the
issue at the close of my discussion.

I suggested that what distinguished the first stage of Reformed

Epistemology from its pre-history was the explicit use of the concepts
of classical foundationalism and evidentialist challenge. What, in turn,
distinguishes the second stage from the first is, of course, the greater
elaboration and articulation of ideas hinted at in the first stage. But
something else as well. In the year we spent together in the Calvin
Center for Christian Scholarship, Plantinga and I read Thomas Reid for
the first time in our lives. For me (and for Plantinga as well, I think), it
was the exhilarating experience of discovering a philosophical soul-
mate. What was it that I (we) found in Reid? I’ve never been able fully
to say – fully to articulate the grounds of the excitement I felt. Some-
thing about the experience has always eluded me. But I know some of
what made me feel I had discovered a philosophical soul-mate.

Reid was not only the first articulate opponent of classical founda-

tionalism in the history of Western philosophy; he was, at the same
time, a metaphysical realist. That’s part of what captivated me; for this
was exactly the combination, realism plus anti-classical-foundationalism,
which I had myself been trying to work out. What also captivated me
was the articulate picture of the human being as having a number of
distinct belief-forming faculties, or dispositions, and of these faculties
as being innocent until proved guilty. In his attack on the sceptic, Reid
argues powerfully that, in the nature of the case, suspicion, whatever
its relevance, cannot be one’s fundamental stance toward one’s belief-
forming faculties. But neither can one give a non-circular defence of
the reliability of one’s faculties. Trust must be one’s fundamental
stance. The neo-Calvinist version of the Augustinian tradition in which
I had been reared, with its motto of faith seeking understanding and its
tacit repudiation of evidentialist apologetics, had also made trust fun-
damental. So no doubt what also led me to sense in Reid a philosophi-
cal soul-mate was the fundamental role of trust in his thought.
Admittedly the trust occurs at a somewhat different point, and has a
somewhat different object; nonetheless, in both cases, human exis-
tence is seen as resting not on proof but trust.

The center of Reid’s thought was his polemic against the explanation

of perception offered by his predecessors, whom Reid lumped together

Nicholas Wolterstorff

as theorists of what he called ‘The Way of Ideas’, and his articulation of
an alternative. The Way of Ideas theorists held that in perception we
form beliefs about our sensations, and then draw rational inferences
from the propositional content of those beliefs, to propositions about
the external world. Reid polemicized powerfully and relentlessly
against that account; what he put in its place was the claim that
though sensations are indeed evoked by the impact of the external
world on us in perception, those sensations immediately evoke in us
conceptions and beliefs about the external world. The move, from sen-
sations to perceptual beliefs, is not by virtue of some rational inference
but by virtue of our ‘hard wiring’. Perception is not rationally grounded!

What this picture of perception suggested to Plantinga and myself

was a way of articulating John Calvin’s suggestion that all humanity is
naturally religious. Belief in God, so Calvin insisted, is not an inven-
tion; on the contrary, we are so created that, if we functioned as we
were designed to function, we would all respond to one and another
aspect of the ‘design’ of the world by immediate beliefs about God.
One cannot understand Reformed Epistemology, as it has been devel-
oped, without discerning its commitment to an anthropology of
religion of this Calvinistic sort: all humanity is naturally theistically
religious. What accounts for the fact that not all human beings do in
fact believe in God is that our indigenous proclivity for forming imme-
diate beliefs about God has been overlaid by our fallenness. We no
longer function as we were created to function.

Reformed Epistemology, through its first two stages, was above all

a brush-clearing operation, designed to dispose of the evidentialist
challenge to theistic belief and of the classical foundationalism which
has typically motivated the evidentialist challenge. The third stage of
Reformed Epistemology, represented by work done since Faith and
Rationality, is differentiated from the second stage by the near-absence
of any further ground-clearing and, in its place, the elaborate articula-
tion of positive epistemological accounts which were only hinted at in
Faith and Rationality. What I mean by Reformed Epistemology broadly
understood is those developments in the epistemology of religious belief
which have occupied the space cleared out by Reformed Epistemology
in its earlier negative phase, this being what I have had in mind by
Reformed Epistemology narrowly understood.

These broader developments have come in two areas which it is

important to distinguish. For one thing, positive epistemologies of a
Reformed-epistemological sort have been developed. Some of this was

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

present already in the second stage, represented by Faith and Rationality;
but that was only a foretaste of what has come forth since then. I have
in mind, in particular, William Alston’s account of religious experience
and the justification it lends to religious beliefs in his Perceiving God;
Plantinga’s account of warrant in his three volumes, Warrant: the Cur-
rent Debate, Warrant as Proper Function, and Warranted Christian Belief;

and my own account of entitlement in my Divine Discourse

and,

much more elaborately, in my forthcoming, World, Mind, and Entitle-
ment to Believe.

Secondly, a considerable number of writings have appeared dealing

with the relevance of faith to theoretical activity. Admittedly it stretches
the word ‘epistemology’ to call these discussions, ‘examples of episte-
mology’; strictly, they belong to Wissenschaftslehre. Yet they have been
so intimately connected with the more strictly epistemological develop-
ments of Reformed Epistemology that it would give a mistaken impres-
sion not to include them under the rubric of ‘Reformed Epistemology’.

Not much of this Reformed Wissenschaftslehre found its way into

Faith and Rationality; epistemology proper proved so fascinating during
the year which gave rise to this volume that it pretty much blocked out
reflections on the relevance of faith to theory. But such reflections were
present already in what I called the ‘first stage’, in my book Reason
within the Bounds of Religion. And they have appeared with fair regular-
ity in the third stage; for example, in Plantinga’s inaugural address at
Notre Dame, ‘Advice to Christian Philosophers’, in George Marsden’s
recent, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship,

and in various

essays of my own.

I mentioned earlier that the positive accounts of doxastic merits devel-

oped by Reformed epistemologists in this third stage have been non-
foundationalist in their basic structure. Let me now explain this claim.

The cognitive-psychological distinction between mediate and immedi-

ate beliefs is one which, so it seems to me, everyone must acknowledge.
Surely we all have beliefs which we have come to hold because we have
inferred them from other beliefs of ours. But inference cannot be the
sole mode of belief-formation. There must be some processes other
than inference that produce beliefs in us; otherwise inference would
have nothing to do its work on. Those will be processes that produce
beliefs immediately.

What distinguishes the foundationalist from his fellow epistemolo-

gists is that he articulates his account of the presence and absence
of whatever might be the doxastic merit on which he has his eye in the

Nicholas Wolterstorff

following way: first he offers an account of what brings it about that
the merit attaches to those immediately held beliefs to which it does
attach, and under what circumstances this is brought about. And then
he offers an account of the circumstances under which inference
succeeds in transferring that merit from immediately held beliefs
which already possess it, to beliefs inferred from those. (Of course,
some beliefs may be produced jointly by immediate-belief-formation
processes and mediate-belief-formation processes.)

This description simply does not fit the basic structure of Plantinga’s

account of warrant, of Alston’s account of those beliefs which are justi-
fied by their being evoked by religious experience, nor of my account
of entitlement. Let me elaborate this claim just a bit for Plantinga’s
account of warrant.

A rough description of Plantinga’s account is this: a belief is war-

ranted just in case it is produced by faculties aimed at truth which
are functioning properly, in situations for which those faculties were
designed to work thus. Notice that nowhere here is the distinction
between immediate and mediate beliefs appealed to. Plantinga’s account
of what brings it about that warrant accrues to a belief does not, in its
basic structure, exhibit the bipartite structure definitive of foundational-
ist accounts. Whether or not the belief under consideration is mediate or
immediate, the relevant question is always and only whether it was pro-
duced by a faculty aimed at truth functioning properly in a situation for
which it was designed. The unified structure which Plantinga’s theory
exhibits allies it, in this regard, with coherentist accounts – though of
course it’s also not a coherentist theory.

It is true that something more requires to be said. Plantinga does

accept the distinction between mediate and immediate modes of belief-
formation. Indeed, when he applies his general account of warrant to
an analysis of the proper functioning of our actual faculties of belief-
formation, he finds it essential to make the distinction. At this second
level, then, his account does exhibit a foundationalist character; noth-
ing of the sort happens in a pure coherentist theory. Furthermore, the
outcome of his analysis at this second level is that the scope of imme-
diately formed beliefs which are warranted is considerably wider than
the classical foundationalist would acknowledge. Nonetheless it remains
true that in its basic structure, Plantinga’s theory is not an expanded
foundationalism but is not a foundationalism at all.

Let me call attention to another aspect of the significance of

Reformed Epistemology by casting a somewhat different light on the
basic structure of the positive epistemological theories which have

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

been developed, in this third stage of their movement, by the
Reformed epistemologists. (I have in mind here epistemology proper,
not Wissenschaftslehre.) Ever since Plato, a certain picture of the ideally
formed belief has haunted Western philosophy, and in particular, the
philosophy of religion. Sometimes the picture has been incorporated
within a theory of knowledge, at other times, within a theory of sci-
ence, on yet other occasions, within a theory of entitlement – and over
and over, within a theory of certitude.

Here is the picture. Fundamental in the life of the mind is acquaintance

with entities, and awareness of having acquaintance with entities. What I
call ‘acquaintance’ is what Kant called Anschauung – standardly, though
not very happily, translated in the English versions of Kant as ‘intuition’.
Or to look at the same thing from the other side: fundamental in the life
of the mind is presence – entities presenting themselves to us, putting
in their appearance to us. Consider the definite description: ‘the dizzi-
ness you felt when you rode that merry-go-round yesterday’. If you did
in fact feel dizzy upon riding a merry-go-round yesterday, then I can
use that definite description to pick out that particular dizziness – to
pick it out well enough to make assertions about it, for example.
Nonetheless, that particular dizziness was never part of the intuitional
content of my mind; I was never acquainted with it, it was never
presented to me. My contact with it is – and was – very different from
my contact with the dizziness I felt when I rode that merry-go-round
yesterday. That dizziness was present to me; I was acquainted with it.

To say it again: acquaintance, and its converse, presence, are in their

various modes fundamental to the life of the mind. Perception has
intuitional content, memory has intuitional content, introspection has
intuitional content, intellection (reason) has intuitional content. Surely
there could be no human mind devoid of all these; perhaps there could
be no such mind at all. (To assure oneself that the four activities just
mentioned do all have an intuitional component, contrast picking out
some entity by means of a definite description, with perceiving,
remembering, introspecting, or intellecting that entity, or an entity of
that sort.) Whatever, if anything, may be true in the currently fashion-
able diatribes against presence, it cannot be that the mind is devoid of
intuitional content.

Among the entities with which we have acquaintance are facts: I per-

ceive that the sun is rising, I introspect that I am feeling rather dizzy, I
remember that the ride made me feel dizzy, I intellect that the proposition,
green is a colour, is necessarily true. And now for the picture of the
ideally formed belief: sometimes, so it has been claimed and assumed,

Nicholas Wolterstorff

one’s acquaintance with some fact, coupled, if necessary, with one’s
awareness of that acquaintance, produces in one a belief whose propo-
sitional content corresponds to the fact with which one is acquainted.
My acquaintance with the fact that I am feeling rather dizzy produces
in me the belief that I am feeling rather dizzy. The content of my belief
is, as it were, read directly off the fact with which I have acquaintance.
How could such a belief possibly be mistaken, it’s been asked. It must
be the case that it is certain.

That’s one type of ideally formed belief, the first grade, as it were: the

belief formed by one’s acquaintance with a fact to which the proposi-
tional content of the belief corresponds. There is a second type, of a
somewhat lower grade: the belief formed by one’s acquaintance with
the fact that the propositional content of the belief is logically entailed
by propositions corresponding to facts of which one is aware. In such a
case, the certainty of one’s belief concerning the premises, coupled with
the certainty of one’s belief concerning the entailment, is transmitted
to one’s belief of the conclusion; it too is certain for one. What
accounts for the fact that such a belief will typically be of a lower grade
than the highest is that one may have acquaintance with the facts
corresponding to the premises in an argument, and acquaintance with
the fact that those premises deductively support the conclusion,
without having acquaintance with the fact corresponding to the con-
clusion. Indeed, therein lies the point of such arguments. Deductive
arguments, if grounded in acquaintance, carry us beyond acquaintance
while yet preserving certitude.

Some writers – such as John Locke – have held that there is a third

grade of ideally formed beliefs, viz., the belief formed by one’s acquain-
tance with the fact that the propositional content of the belief is probable
relative to facts with which one has acquaintance. It was especially
inductive arguments that Locke had in mind. Locke recognized that
inductive arguments are incapable of transmitting certainty to the con-
clusion; hence beliefs thus formed are of a lower grade than the others.
Nonetheless, Locke quite clearly regarded inductive arguments as like
deductive in that, if one has collected a satisfactory body of evidence as
premises, and if one is acquainted with the facts corresponding to the
premises and with the fact that the conclusion is more probable than
not on those premises, then one’s acceptance of the conclusion is
entirely grounded in acquaintance.

One can see why The Doxastic Ideal has had the appeal which it has

had: there is something admirable about beliefs which measure up to
the Ideal – especially, about beliefs which measure up to the first stage

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

of the Ideal. A belief evoked by acquaintance with the fact to which
the propositional content of the belief corresponds: what could be
better, more satisfying, than that, and more reassuring! A belief evoked
by acquaintance with the fact that the propositional content of the
belief is entailed by beliefs of the first sort: such a belief is only slightly
less satisfying. But the point to be made here is that such beliefs are
not ideal for us human beings, in our situation. What has been taken to
be The Doxastic Ideal is not ideal for us. The failure of a belief to mea-
sure up to the Ideal does not, so far forth, point to a deficiency which
we human beings ought to remove, or even to a deficiency which it
would be desirable for us to remove. Our belief-forming constitution
does not measure up to the supposed ideal in its indigenous workings;
nor is it possible to revise its workings so that those workings do all
measure up to the supposed ideal. And even if it were possible, even if
we could somehow manage to reshape our belief-forming self so that it
conformed in its workings to the supposed ideal, we would find our-
selves with too scanty a body of beliefs for life to continue. Once again,
when we look deep into human existence, we spy trust.

It was the two great eighteenth-century Scotsmen, David Hume and

Thomas Reid, who first, powerfully and directly, challenged The Doxastic
Ideal by arguing that, whatever philosophers might prefer, our human
condition is such that vast numbers of the beliefs we have, and with-
out which we could not live, were neither formed in accord with The
Doxastic Ideal nor could be so formed, while yet being entitled,
warranted, justified, or what have you.

Hume argued the case most powerfully for beliefs about the future

formed by induction. I see that the car ahead of me has veered off the
mountain road and is now unsupported in the air; that experience
evokes in me immediately the belief that the car will descend with
increasing rapidity. The propositional content of the belief does not
correspond to the fact perceived. It may be, however, that what
accounts for the formation of the belief that the car will descend with
increasing rapidity is that I make a logically valid inference to this
from another belief that I surely form, namely, that the car is now
unsupported in the air – perhaps with some other beliefs tossed in
which I have arrived at by the exercise of reason? Not at all, argued
Hume. What accounts for the formation of the belief that the car will
descend with increasing rapidity is not an exercise of reason but just
the habit, or custom, which has been formed in me by my experience
of many similar such events. Reid fully accepted this analysis by Hume
of the formation of inductive beliefs, and went on to offer a broadly

Nicholas Wolterstorff

similar account of perceptual beliefs, of memorial beliefs, and of beliefs
formed by testimony. All such beliefs are formed in us by virtue of our
‘hard wiring’, not by the employment of rational inference. None is
rationally grounded.

One aspect of the significance of Reformed Epistemology, intimately

related to its use of Reid to explicate Calvin’s religious anthropology, is
that it repudiates The Doxastic Ideal generally, and repudiates it, in
particular, for religious beliefs. Consider one of Plantinga’s examples.
One looks up at night and perceives a starry sky – one perceives that
there’s a vast starry sky before one. That perception in turn evokes in
one immediately the belief that God must have made all this. This
latter belief may very well be warranted, Plantinga argues. Yet the
content of the belief – namely, that God must have made all this – does
not correspond to the fact one perceives – namely, that there’s a starry
sky before one. It goes beyond that. In declaring that the belief evoked
may well have warrant, Plantinga is so far forth repudiating The
Doxastic Ideal.

Or consider one of the cases I cite in my discussion of entitled reli-

gious belief in Divine Discourse. Augustine hears a child over the garden
wall chanting ‘take and read, take and read’. After some quick reflection,
Augustine finds this uncanny. Perhaps he believes that it is uncanny;
more likely he hears it as uncanny. It quickly occurs to him that maybe
the chant is part of a game; but he can’t think of any such game. That’s
really a throw away point, however; it makes no difference one way or
the other. Augustine has an intimation that the words, whatever led
the child to chant them, may well be appropriate to his condition;
that’s what makes the chanting acquire an uncanny character for him.
And that experience evokes in him immediately the belief that God
is speaking to him, telling him to open his copy of Paul’s Epistles
and read.

If this is how it went – Augustine’s description is too brief for us to be

sure of all the details – the resultant belief, in its mode of formation,
certainly does not measure up to The Doxastic Ideal. The propositional
content of the belief which gets formed in Augustine is that God is
speaking to him. But the fact which he hears is the fact of a child chant-
ing ‘tolle lege,’ or rather, the fact of the uncanniness of the child’s chant-
ing ‘tolle lege’ within his earshot right then. Nonetheless Augustine was,
so I argue, entitled to the belief that God was speaking to him.

In conclusion, let me return to a point which I raised earlier but then

reserved for later discussion. The Reformed Epistemologist regards a
great deal of religious language as being about God; that is to say, he is

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

of the view that in our use of religious language, we often refer to God.
He is furthermore of the view that often, having referred to God, we
predicate something of that to which we referred; and he regards such
predications as true or false of God, depending on the facts of the mat-
ter. If I exclaim with the Psalmist, ‘Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all
that is within me, bless God’s holy name,’ I am referring to God but
not predicating anything of God; by no means all language about God
is assertory in character. This is a point that the Wittgensteinians are
fond of making; and the Reformed epistemologist heartily agrees. Non-
assertory ‘God-talk’ may nonetheless incorporate references to God, as
the example just given illustrates. And a good deal of language about
God is in fact assertory; it does predicate something of that to which
one referred, viz., God.

My interpretation of the mainline Wittgensteinians is that they deny

that we ever refer to God, and also deny, consequently, that we ever
predicate things of God. ‘God-talk’ is not to be construed as incorporat-
ing references to God and as predicating something of that to which
one referred. To conclude my discussion I propose to join the fray on
this issue – without any expectation that my intervention will prove
decisive!

Let me approach the battleground by expressing my disagreement

with Phillips on what he sees as the status of the issue within Reformed
Epistemology. At several points, Phillips describes the Reformed episte-
mologist as trying to ‘justify’ our ‘epistemic practices’ – by which he
means, trying to show that our modes of belief-formation are reliable, in
that the beliefs they produce correspond to objective reality.

I submit

that the Reformed epistemologist attempts no such thing. To the con-
trary, Reformed epistemologists regularly cite Reid’s argument against
the sceptic to the effect that, in the nature of the case, such an attempt
will prove either arbitrary or self-defeating.

‘Epistemic practices’ is an ambiguous term. It might mean, as I just

now, following Phillips, took it to mean, modes of belief formation. But it
might also mean, modes of belief evaluation. It is practices of belief evalua-
tion that the Reformed epistemologist has in the centre of his attention.
We human beings engage in the practice of evaluating our beliefs as
warranted, as rational, as justified, as cases of knowledge, as entitled,
and so forth. The Reformed epistemologist doesn’t invent these prac-
tices. He finds them, and finds that he himself is a participant in them.
And he accepts them. It’s not his goal to criticize them in any general
sort of way; witness Plantinga’s ‘epistemology from below’. Though he,
like everybody else, thinks that people make mistakes in what they

Nicholas Wolterstorff

appraise as warranted, as entitled, and so forth, he is not of the view
that everybody is almost entirely wrong about knowledge, almost
entirely wrong about entitlement and so forth. In the first and second
stages of the movement, what the Reformed epistemologist subjected
to critique was not our practices of doxastic evaluation but the analysis
and critique of those practices offered by the classical foundationalists.
In the third stage of the movement, his goal has been to give his own
positive account of these practices of evaluation. On this point, then,
there’s no dispute between the Reformed epistemologist and the
Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion.

Rather often Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion have been

charged with offering an atheistic account of religious language.
‘Absolutely not,’ they say, bridling at the charge. It’s their view that the
existence of God is taken for granted in all that the theistically religious
person believes and says. The last thing such a person will say is, ‘God
does not exist.’ The ‘grammar’ of theistic religious language requires not
saying that. Saying that would be tantamount to repudiating one’s
(theistic) religion. Of course theistically religious people, when engaged
in their religious way of life, don’t go around saying, ‘God exists.’
Instead they praise God, bless God, petition God, and so forth. But if
pressed on the issue, they will say emphatically, ‘God exists’ – though
it falls strangely on their ears. In short, this way of getting at the fun-
damental issue which divides Reformed epistemologists from mainline
Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion proves a dead-end.

Other such dead-ends could be explored. But let me, on this occa-

sion, resist entering all such dead-ends and state without further ado
what I regard as the fundamental point of dispute. That is this: is it
possible to refer to God; and, having referred, is it possible to predicate
things of God?

Let’s take D.Z. Phillips as the paradigmatic Wittgensteinian philoso-

pher of religion. In some of the passages in which Phillips discusses God
and reference, what he says, taken strictly, is not that we cannot refer to
God, but that God is not an object to which we can refer, with the con-
text suggesting that by an ‘object’, Phillips means an entity occupying
a place in space. In one passage he says, for example, ‘Talk of God’s
existence or reality cannot be considered as talk about the existence of
an object. Neither can questions about whether we mean the same by
“God” be construed as whether we are referring to the same object.’

Now I myself find it extremely unlikely that anybody likely to read
Phillips’s writings does believe that God is an object occupying space;
accordingly, given the rules of ‘conversational implication’, one asks

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

oneself whether perhaps Phillips doesn’t mean to say or suggest some-
thing more, or something else. Why bother telling us that God is not a
spatial object?

This query gains added force from the rhetorical structure of some of

the relevant passages. Here is an example of what I have in mind:

If, … having heard of people praising the Creator of heaven and earth,
glorifying the Father of us all, feeling answerable to the One who sees
all, someone were to say, ‘But these are only religious perspectives,
show me what they refer to’, this would be a misunderstanding of
the grammar of such perspective. … The religious pictures give one a
language in which it is possible to think about human life in a cer-
tain way. The pictures … provide the logical space within which
such thoughts can have a place. When these thoughts are found in
worship, the praising and the glorifying does not refer to some
object called God. Rather, the expression of such praise and glory is
what we call the worship of God.

The imagined interlocutor asks to be shown what the religious perspec-
tives refer to. Now if by ‘show’ he’s asking to have the spatial object
called God displayed to him, then indeed he’s deeply confused – though
to interpret his words thus is to interpret them with a woodenness that
Phillips would rightly leap upon if exhibited in some philosopher’s
interpretation of religious language. But let that pass. Phillips does not
respond to this imagined remark by correcting the confusion about
the nature of God which the remark (on the interpretation being con-
sidered) exhibits. Instead he makes quite a different point. What he
says is that ‘The religious pictures give one a language in which it is
possible to think about human life in a certain way’ – not, notice, a
language in which it is possible to think about God and God’s relation to
human life in a certain way, but a language in which it is possible to
think about human life in a certain way. So too, after remarking, two
sentences later, that ‘the praising and the glorifying does not refer
to some object called God,’ he goes on to say that ‘the expression of
such praise and glory is what we call the worship of God’. If the
mistake of the interlocutor was to suppose that God is a spatial object
which can be referred to, how would this be an answer to that? In short,
the rhetorical structure of the passage suggests that the worship of God
has nothing at all to do with whether there’s any reference to God, and
whether praise is addressed to the being referred to. Worship of God
only has to do with whether certain ‘thoughts are found in worship’.

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Finally, then, consider this passage:

In face of what is given, the believer kneels. Talk of ‘God’ has its sense
in this reaction. It is not the name of an individual; it does not refer
to anything. … It is all too easy to conclude that if religious expres-
sions which involve talk of God are not referring expressions, if no
object corresponds to such talk, such expressions cannot say any-
thing nor can they be held to be true. In this chapter, however, we
have seen that this argument contains unwarrantable assumptions.
We have argued for other possibilities. When these are recognized we
see that religious expressions of praise, glory, etc. are not referring
expressions. These activities are expressive in character, and what
they express is called the worship of God. Is it reductionism to say
that what is meant by the reality of God is to be found in certain
pictures which say themselves?

Now all ambiguity has been dissipated. The word ‘God’ does not refer
to anything. Initially we had some reason to think that the mistake
of the interlocutor was to suppose that in our use of ‘God talk’ we refer
to a spatial object. Now we see that, on Phillips’s view, his mistake
goes deeper; he doesn’t get home free by conceding that, when using
‘God talk’, we refer to a being who transcends this spatial order.
The mistake of the interlocutor was in assuming that ‘God talk’ is refer-
ential. Such speech is purely expressive in character; praise is expres-
sive activity. And when the one who praises uses ‘God talk’, such
expressive activity just is what constitutes the worship of God. There’s
nothing more to the worship of God than that. Now we understand
why the passages quoted earlier have the rhetorical structure to which
I pointed.

Phillips is remarkably chary of telling us why, on his view, ‘God talk’

is purely expressive – why the word ‘God’, as used by religious people,
‘does not refer to anything’. Sometimes one gets the impression that
it’s a doctrine of reference which is at work: we can only refer to that
which occupies a place in space. At other times one gets the impression
that what’s operating is a certain theology, along the lines of Plotinus,
Kant and Tillich: God is not a one-among-others that can be picked
out. Best not to speculate, however. Phillips never lays out his reasons;
he contents himself with heaping ridicule on anyone who uses the
word ‘individual’ or ‘object’ when speaking of God, never telling us
what word he himself prefers, if any, and on insisting that religious dis-
course is in good measure not assertory in character.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Now it’s possible that Phillips didn’t really mean what he said in the

passages to which I have pointed from Religion without Explanation. But
just as I am not aware of any passage in which Phillips explains why he
holds that the word ‘God’ ‘does not refer to anything’, so too I am not
aware of any in which, to correct misinterpretations of his thought, he
says flat out that of course he believes that ‘God’ is used by theists to
refer; all he ever wanted to say was that God is not a spatial object – or
all he ever wanted to say was that Plotinus was right in holding that
God is not a one-among-others. So I think we have no option but to
hold that Phillips did and does mean what he said there.

It’s on this issue of reference and predication concerning God (along

with the issue of whether theistic language implies existential quantifica-
tions over God) that Phillips’s version of Wittgensteinianism clashes most
directly with Reformed Epistemology. For the Reformed epistemologist
understands himself, when using ‘God talk’, as referring to God. And
though one can refer to God without predicating something of God – as
when the psalmist enjoins himself to bless God’s holy name – the
Reformed epistemologist understands himself as often going on to
predicate things of God, these predications then being true or false of
God depending on the fact of the matter. The Reformed epistemologist
understands his religious cohorts as regularly doing the same things he
does – namely, refer to God and predicate things of God. Thus the
Reformed epistemologist holds that a great deal of theistic religious
language is used referentially and predicatively concerning God, and
that a great deal of it entails propositions expressed with sentences
which quantify over God. If there is no such being as God, then, on
the account of theistic religious language which is taken for granted by
the Reformed epistemologist, theistic religious language misfires in a
most radical way. For of course one cannot refer to, and predicate
things of, what there isn’t.

Who’s right on this issue? No doubt there’s room here for a good

deal of philosophical to-ing and fro-ing, each side pressing the other
for reasons for his position, questioning those reasons, trying to extract
‘absurd’ consequences from the other’s position, and so on. It’s my
own guess, however, that when the dust has settled, it’s going to come
down to what those who use theistic language in a serious religious
way, and who grasp the philosophical issues at stake, understand them-
selves as intending to do when they use ‘God talk’.

I judge myself to be such a person, and my fellow Reformed episte-

mologists to be such as well. And we understand ourselves, when using
‘God talk’, to be intending to refer to God and (often) to predicate

Nicholas Wolterstorff

things of God; likewise we understand ourselves, when using theistic
language, to be saying things which imply that there is a being such
that it is identical with God. If we were persuaded that those intentions
were fundamentally misguided because there is no such being as God,
then we would cease using ‘God talk’ – other than to join our atheist
friends in exclaiming, ‘Thank God it’s Friday!’ What’s the point of
talking about God saving us if there’s no God to do the saving!

D.Z. Phillips is also someone who uses theistic language in a serious

religious way, and who understands the philosophical issues at stake.
Yet he does not understand himself to be meaning to use ‘God talk’ ref-
erentially and predicatively.

So what’s the solution? One possibility is that one or the other of us

fails to understand our own intentions in using ‘God talk’. What
strikes me as much more plausible is that we simply use theistic
language in fundamentally different ways. Phillips offers what we can
assume to be an accurate description of how he and his fellow main-
line Wittgensteinians use theistic language; I gave what I take to be an
accurate description of how I and my fellow Reformed epistemologists
use theistic language. So we’re both right – provided that we both
avoid universalization. Phillips’s account holds for himself and main-
line Wittgensteinians, but not for me and my fellow Reformed episte-
mologists; my account holds for myself and my fellow Reformed
epistemologists, but not for mainline Wittgensteinians.

What holds for all the others – for all the other users of theistic

language? My own guess is that almost all of them, if they saw the
issue, would say that they meant to be using theistic language as I and
my fellow Reformed epistemologists use it, not as Phillips uses it.
Almost all of them would feel profoundly disillusioned if they came to
the view that God is not among that which is available for reference
and predication – for the reason that it’s not true that there exists a
being which is God. If Phillips’s religious use of theistic language con-
forms to his description, then his use represents a revision of how such
language has traditionally been used; his religious use of such language
is a revisionist use.

Phillips understands himself, in his writings, as speaking not reli-

giously but philosophically; and over and over he says that his aim, as
philosopher, is not to revise but describe. His description does not
hold, however, for how Reformed epistemologists use theistic lan-
guage; nor, I contend, for how most people use such language. His
description holds only for a rather select group of Wittgensteinians and
their allies. Yet his words regularly carry the suggestion that he is

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

describing all serious religious use of theistic language. Accordingly, his
description is, for most people, a misdescription. And should his dis-
cussion succeed in getting some people to think they are using theistic
language in his way, when in fact they have been using it in my way,
then his discussion threatens to do what he says he wants at all cost to
avoid doing; namely, it threatens to function not as description but as
revision.

Notes

1. University of Notre Dame Press.
2. Nous, March 1981.
3. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co.
4. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
5. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co.
6. New York: Routledge, 1988.
7. Ibid., p. 259.
8. See, for example, ibid., pp. 32–3.
9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, 1993 and 2000.

10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
11. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
12. See, for example, ibid., p. 33.
13. Religion without Explanation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), p. 174.
14. Ibid., pp. 148–9.
15. Ibid., pp. 148, 150.

Nicholas Wolterstorff

On Behalf of the Evidentialist –
a Response to Wolterstorff

Stephen J. Wykstra

Why don’t you just scrap this God business, says one of my
bitter suffering friends. It’s a rotten world, you and I have been
shafted, and that’s that.

I’m pinned down. When I survey this gigantic intricate

world, I cannot believe that it just came about. I do not mean
that I have some good arguments for its being made and that I
believe in the arguments. I mean that this conviction wells up
irresistibly within me when I contemplate the world.

Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son

Reformed epistemology as religious philosophy

Nicholas Wolterstorff has given us an illuminating account of the
development and main claims of Reformed Epistemology. Reformed
Epistemology, he has stressed, seeks to provide an account of the
epistemological status of theistic belief, not an overall philosophy
of religion. In the 1980s, its project was primarily negative aiming to
overcome the evidentialist challenge, alleging that theistic belief is
lacking in warrant or entitlement if it is not supported by good rea-
sons. So this phase was brush-clearing, seeking to clear away evidential-
ist bramble. In the 1990s, its project has become more positive, aiming,
we might say, to grow, in the place of the bramble, a garden of new
epistemological insights about what gives theistic belief its various
doxastic merits, and what makes it deeply relevant to the theoretical
and interpretive disciplines.

Reformed Epistemology is, Wolterstorff has stressed, not a philosophy

of religion; but his description of its roots indicate that it is a religious
philosophy. For it is rooted in the vision of neo-Calvinism, especially as

Stephen J. Wykstra

articulated by Abraham Kuyper. And that vision is itself religious in
character. What, epistemologically speaking, is at its heart? It is, I
think, that God has made each of us so that we can, through God’s
regenerating and sanctifying work in our lives, increasingly come to
know God in a cognitively direct way. Direct does not here mean
individualistic. Reformed thinkers prize the Scriptures, the community
which is the priesthood of all believers, the sacraments, and the
preaching of the Word. So the idea of directness is not that we need
these things – the Word, the sacraments, the community less and less as
we spiritually mature; to the contrary, we need these things more and
more. Rather, the idea is that God has made us so that as we mature,
our knowing God through these things rests more and more on some-
thing involving God’s own testimony in our hearts, as he uses these
things to bring us to Himself.

This conception of religious knowing is stressed by Calvin and later

reformed theologians (though of course it can also be found within
other currents within the great river of Christian tradition as well). It
is itself a religious vision, part of a religious worldview. The Reformed
Epistemologists (and here I mean Plantinga, Wolterstorff and William
Alston, an Episcopalian who is a kind of honorary Reformed thinker)
have used developments in meta-epistemology to give a philosophical
elaboration and deployment of this vision, and used the vision to
propel new developments in epistemology. They thus themselves
exemplify the thesis that Christian theism is deeply relevant to the
theoretical and interpretative disciplines.

Objections

What, then, of objections to Reformed epistemology? In addition to
objections discussed by Wolterstorff, these have come from three main
quarters.

First, there are objections from the quarters of analytic philosophers

who think theistic religion is or may be unreasonable due to eviden-
tialist deficiencies.

Second, there are objections from what we might call the pluralists

those who find Reformed epistemology too complacent in what it says
or fails to say about rival sources of insight which conflict with the
deliverances of theistic practice. One group of rivals consists of other
religious traditions; another source consists of secular sources of
insight, like Nietzsche, Freud and Marx.

Third, there are objections from theists who think Reformed episte-

mology has insufficient appreciation for the value of evidential support
for various theistic beliefs. Catholic critics have faulted Reformed
thinkers for depreciating the role of natural theology. Evangelical critics
have pleaded for more recognition of the importance of Christian
apologetics, not so much in the tradition of natural theology, but in the
tradition of evidences of Christianity, reasoned defences of the reliabil-
ity of the gospels, the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, and so on.

These three sources of objections overlap, of course, and certain com-

mon themes emerge. In particular, many (though not all) of the critics
think that there is more to be said on behalf of evidentialism than
Reformed thinkers have granted. And this is the issue I would like to
press. I shall do so in my own way, since I know it best. Wolterstorff
remarks that one characteristic of the positive phase of Reformed epis-
temology has been an almost total absence of further ground-clearing.
There has been little looking backward at the pile of evidentialist bram-
ble that was cleared. I shall poke around in the bramble, to see if there
might still not be a green branch that belongs in the Reformed garden.

What is the real issue?

Let’s begin by going back to the issue dividing Reformed thinkers from
their polemical partner, the evidentialists. That issue is whether theistic
belief needs evidence. Evidentialists think that it does; Reformed episte-
mologists think that it doesn’t. They urge, instead, that theistic belief, at
its epistemic best, is a ‘properly basic’ belief, akin to our beliefs in physi-
cal objects or the past or other minds. I shall call this thesis basicalism,
and shall often refer to a Reformed Epistemologist as a basicalist. It is
perhaps an ugly term, but it provides the right contrast to evidentialist.

Basicalists, then, say that theistic belief does not need evidence;

belief in God, as Plantinga puts it (1983, p. 17) can be ‘entirely right,
proper, and rational without any evidence or argument at all’. Now it is
crucial to realize that when basicalists say this, they are using the term
evidence in a narrow sense. This is, as Plantinga himself fully realizes,
a somewhat artificial sense. I believe I have two hands: do I have
evidence of my senses. So the natural sense of the word evidence is
a broad sense, a sense that includes not only inferential arguments, but
also direct or immediate justifiers like sensory evidence, memory dispo-
sitions, and so on. Reformed thinkers, however, are not using the term
in this broad sense. When they speak of evidence, they mean, almost
always, inferential evidence. (Inferential evidence consists of other

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

propositions we believe, from which we infer the truth of the belief in
question.) When basicalists want to speak of non-inferential justifiers,
they use the term grounds rather than evidence. My belief that I have
two hands does not rest on evidence, but on grounds.

So the Great Dividing Issue between basicalists and evidentialists is

this: Does theistic belief need evidence in the narrow inferential sense of
evidence? We might think we are now clear about what the dividing
issue is. But are we? I do not think so. The notion of needing inferen-
tial evidence is far more slippery than one might think.

What is it for a belief to need inferential evidence? Our initial grasp of

the notion tends to come from familiar examples. That the sun is shining
outside my window is something I can just tell by looking and seeing;
that 1 plus 1 is 2 is something immediately obvious to my reason. These
claims do not need inferential evidence; they can properly be believed
in a basic (that is, non-inferential) way. But I also believe things whose
truth is not obvious in any such basic way – that the sun is about
93 million miles away, or that 17 times 139 equals 2363, or that atoms
are made of protons, electrons and neutrons. So such claims, if they are
to be properly believed, need to be secured by inference of an appropri-
ate sort. Call them properly inferential propositions.

But what does it really mean, to say that these latter claims need

inferential evidence? Take the claim about the sun; we all surely agree
that in some sense, it does need inferential evidence. (We also pre-
sume, of course, that it has what it needs. The word ‘needs’ here is used
in that sense that does not imply a lack. The paradigm is Humans need
water, not I need a drink.) But who needs to know this evidence? Surely
I do not personally need to know it. Certain astronomers who work on
these things need to know it. And similarly for my belief that atoms
are made of electrons, protons, and neutrons: for my belief to be okay,
it is not necessary for me to know the evidence for this. Rather, it is
certain physicists that must know this evidence (and, of course, I must
be in some sort of appropriate relation to them).

‘I must’? – for the sake of what? Imagine we learn, ten years from

now, that scientists didn’t really have this evidence for electrons, but had
instead been duped by some extremely clever conmen in Copenhagen.
Does that mean you and I, in 1999, were improper in believing what
we did about electrons? That doesn’t seem right. Perhaps we (looking
back) would say our beliefs had some sort of defect, but the defect does
not seem to be that we were improper in holding them.

So the notion of needing inferential evidence is slippery in two ways.

First, it is not easy to say what relation to the evidence is needed. And

Stephen J. Wykstra

second, it is not easy to say what, for the sake of which evidence is
needed. This is so, I am suggesting, even when one thinks about simple
scientific beliefs. Evidentialism seems like the right stance to take
toward these beliefs: it does seem they are things that need evidence.
But it is not easy to spell out this means.

Doxastic merits

Let me now connect this to a point made by Wolterstorff. He notes
that there are a multiplicity of doxastic merits that beliefs can have. (In
many twentieth-century disputes about the correct explication of what
it is for a belief to be justified, he suggests that rival theorists actually
have different doxastic merits in mind, and thus have different expli-
canda.) In particular, Wolterstorff distinguishes between the merits of
entitlement and warrant. He then proposes that Reformed epistemol-
ogy (in its negative phase) should be understood

to be the claim, for some particular doxastic merit, that there are
beliefs about God held immediately [non-inferentially] which possess
that merit.

Accordingly, he says, in speaking of the negative phase of Reformed
Epistemology:

we ought not speak of Reformed Epistemology tout court, but of
Reformed Epistemology concerning warrant, of Reformed Episte-
mology concerning entitlement, etc.

This is surely right systematically. But historically, it seems to me that
this particular distinction emerged only in the third positive phase of
Reformed epistemology. With the exception of a single footnote, I find
no cognizance of this distinction in Faith and Rationality, the locus
classicus of Reformed epistemology in its negative, or evidentialism-
overcoming, phase. No, in that phase Reformed thinkers always had in
mind the doxastic merit of rationality. In asserting that theistic belief
does not need evidence, they were always claiming that theistic belief
does not need evidence to be rational. The distinctions they drew were
distinctions helping to clarify the term rational, not to distinguish
it from warrant. This means they always construed evidentialism as
claiming that if the believer believes without basing his or her belief on
evidence, then he or she is in some sense irrational.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Stephen J. Wykstra

Rationality-evidentialism

Let us make this construal more explicit. Evidentialism, so construed,
says theistic belief needs evidence if theists are to be rational (or to
avoid being irrational) in their believing. But what is it, to be ‘rational’
(or ‘irrational’)? Reformed thinkers considered two broad possibilities.
The first is that being rational is a matter of fulfilling our intellectual
duties – our duties in matters of forming and regulating our beliefs. An
irrational belief is one that violates these duties: irrationality, on this
construal, is doxastic sin. The second possibility construes rationality
as a matter of manifesting certain ‘excellences’ in belief-formation.
Richard has a brain tumour, causing him to form paranoid beliefs that
his wife is trying to kill him. Given the tumour, he cannot help but do
this. We would not blame him, thinking he is violating some duty;
nevertheless we might well call him irrational. (‘How could Rich accuse
me like that?,’ his wife sobs. ‘Jane’, the doctor replies, ‘you’ve got to
remember the tumour is making him irrational.’) Richard’s believing
falls short of standards, but these standards prescribe, not duties, but
desirable or excellent ways of functioning, akin to standards informing
our judgements about health. On this second construal, irrationality is
not doxastic sin but doxastic sickness.

Both explications capture important ordinary uses of the term

‘rational’. Moreover, they have an important commonality. On both,
to deem a person irrational is to diagnose something as ‘going wrong’
in the subject holding the belief. It is something in this believ-
ing subject whether a culpable sin or a non-culpable sickness that
needs changing or fixing, if things are to be brought up to snuff.
Evaluations of rationality and irrationality are, we can put it, subject-
focused evaluations. And evidentialism, on this construal, is thus
claiming that theistic belief needs inferential evidence in order for the
believing subject to be free of doxastic sin or doxastic sickness in his
believing.

But in requiring that theistic belief be based on evidence, what

relation to evidence would such an evidentialist then be claiming that
theistic belief ‘needs’? If we are taking evidence to be needed for the
sake of the rationality of the subject, what is needed is, plausibly, that
the believing subject herself be cognizant of the evidence and its evi-
dential bearing on the proposition she believes, and that she hold the
belief partly because of this. Putative evidence will not contribute to an
individual’s being rational in believing some proposition, unless this
evidence fall within that individual’s cognizance. So evidentialism, as

addressed by Reformed epistemologists, was always construed as claiming
something like this:

Any individual believing that God exists must, in order to be ratio-
nal, hold this belief on the basis of his/her own inference of it from
evidence.

Let us call this rationality-evidentialism.

Is overcoming rationality-evidentialism enough?

But is rationality-evidentialism really the right way to construe the
evidentialist’s core intuition that theistic belief ‘needs evidence’? Here
consider Plantinga’s counterexample against one variety of evidentialism
construed in this way. Plantinga considers a 14 year old who believes
in God, having been raised in a community where everyone so believes.
This young man, stipulates that Plantinga (1983, p. 33):

doesn’t believe in God on the basis of evidence. He has never heard
of the cosmological, teleological, or ontological arguments; in fact
no one has ever presented him with any evidence at all. And
although he has often been told about God, he doesn’t take that
testimony as evidence; he doesn’t reason thus: everyone around
here says that God loves us and cares for us; most of what everyone
around here says is true; so probably that’s true. Instead, he simply
believes what he’s taught.

Let’s call this young man ‘Hansel’. As Plantinga describes him, Hansel
simply believes what his elders have taught him about God. In so
doing, is Hansel necessarily irrational? Rationality-evidentialism entails
that he is; but surely, says Plantinga, it is quite implausible to think
that in so believing, this youth is irrational in the sense of being in
violation of his doxastic duties. Plantinga seems to me right about this;
and he remains right, I believe, when we construe rationality in any of
its plausible senses. The case of Hansel, then, gives us reason to reject
rationality-evidentialism.

But does it tell against evidentialism? Does rejecting rationality-

evidentialism mean rejecting the core intuition of evidentialism? To
answer this, let us return to the point I made earlier: we are, almost all
of us, ‘evidentialists’ about some things. Almost all of us would want to
say, intuitively, that a claim like ‘electrons exist’ needs inferential

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

evidence. So most of us, even if we are Reformed thinkers about belief
in God, are evidentialists about electrons (or about the distance of the
sun from the earth, and so on). Now, in taking it intuitively that elec-
tron-belief ‘needs evidence’, are we really endorsing rationality-eviden-
tialism about electrons? Are we, that is, endorsing the claim:

Any individual believing that electrons exist must, in order to be
rational, hold his/her belief that electrons exist on the basis of
his/her own inference of it from evidence.

Surely not. For suppose we consider some 14-year-old girl who believes
that electrons exist, having been raised in a community where every-
one so believes. Gretel, as we may call her, doesn’t believe in electrons
on the basis of evidence. She has never heard of the Millikan oil
drop experiment, of electron-diffraction, or of the quantum-theoretic
explanations of spectroscopic data; in fact no one has ever presented
her with any evidence for electrons at all. And although she has often
been told about electrons, she doesn’t take that testimony as evidence;
she doesn’t reason thus: everyone around here says that electrons exist;
most of what everyone around here says is true; so probably that’s true.
Instead, she simply believes what she’s taught.

So Gretel, like Hansel, believes what her elders have taught her,

without knowing the evidence. Now in our intuitive evidentialism
about electrons, are we saying that Gretel is necessarily irrational in
this? One hopes not. Only an epistemic Scrooge would immediately
deem Gretel as doxastically sick or sinful in believing her teachers as
she does. Gretel (like Hansel) need not be irrational in so believing; so
rationality-evidentialism about electron belief is wrong. But does this
mean that our intuitive evidentialism about electrons is wrong? Does
admitting that Gretel might be okay entail admitting that we were
wrong in our core intuition that electron theory ‘needs inferential
evidence’? Surely not. What the case of Gretel teaches us is not that our
intuitive evidentialism about electrons is wrong; what it teaches us is
that this evidentialism is not faithfully captured or adequately expli-
cated by rationality-evidentialism.

But now let us suppose that what evidentialists want to say about

theistic belief is what we, almost all of us, want to say (and have a hard
time saying clearly) about electron-belief. Then rationality-evidentialism
also does not faithfully capture what the evidentialist really wants to
say about theistic belief.

Stephen J. Wykstra

Towards a more sensible evidentialism

What, then, do we mean, when we intuitively take electron-belief to
‘need evidence’? There are two sub-questions to press here. First, what
sort of relation to evidence do we take electron-belief (qua believing) to
need? The case of Gretel gives a clue here. She believes in electrons on
the say-so or testimony or authority of her teacher in accord with what
Reid calls the Credulity Principle. And her teacher may have also
acquired his belief in a similar way, so there is here a chain of testi-
monial grounding. But such a chain must somewhere have an anchor:
Neils may believe in electrons by trusting the say-so of Ernst; and Ernst,
by trusting the say-so of Wolfgang, but somewhere this chain must be
anchored in someone’s believing in electrons on a non-testimonial
basis. And when we, as evidentialists, insist that belief in electrons
needs evidence, it is this ultimate anchoring that we have in mind.

At the heart of our evidentialism regarding electrons, in other words, is

the intuition that inferential evidence for electrons needs to be available
to the community of electron-believers. We do not mean that each individ-
ual electron-believer needs to have sorted through this evidence or even
that each believer is able to do so. (Hansel and Gretel may be so deficient
in mathematical ability that the evidential case for electrons will forever
be beyond their grasp.) No, what is needed is that they be appropriately
connected to an electron-believing community, that there be an infer-
ential case for electrons available to this community, and that some
appropriate segment of that community have processed this evidence.
The needed relation to evidence is a communitarian relation, rather
than an individualistic one.

The second question is this: for the sake of what doxastic merit is

evidence needed? Reformed epistemologists construe evidentialism as
claiming that it is needed for the sake of avoiding irrationality. But is
this why a communitarian relation to evidence is needed? Consider
again Gretel, believing in electrons on the say-so of her fifth grade
teacher. We presume, normally, that an evidential case for electrons is
indeed available to the community to which she and her teacher
belong. But is it the rationality of Gretel’s belief that is enhanced by this
presumed case? Well, imagine that we learn, ten years from now, that
our presumption was mistaken – that there is no good evidential case
for electrons, and that the entire presumed case for electrons was an
elaborate hoax perpetrated by clever conmen in Copenhagen in the
1920s. Would learning this lead us to revise our judgement that Gretel
was rational – would we, that is, deem that she was (and all along had

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

been) irrational in believing in electrons on the say-so of her teacher?
Surely not. But this means it is not for the sake of the rationality of her
electron-belief that we think such evidence is needed.

Warrant

Wolterstorff refers to the distinction between entitlement and warrant;
let us now ask whether we can explicate our evidentialism about elec-
trons in terms of warrant. The term is Plantinga’s; he introduces it as a
covering term to refer to that special whatever-it-is which, when added
to a true belief, makes that true belief a case of knowledge. Classical
internalists took that Special Something to be a certain high degree of
being justified in believing, where being justified is closely allied to
being rational in one’s believing. But externalists hold that it consists
in the knowing subject and known object being in a certain type of
relationship – a relationship I shall call ‘successful epistemic hookup’.
On ‘reliabilist’ theories, a belief has warrant when it is produced by a
‘reliable process’, a process that produces, or would produce, true
beliefs a sufficiently high proportion of the time. What matters, say
reliabilists, is the ‘external’ fact that the process is reliable – not that the
subject has any awareness of or access to this reliability. Reliabilists are
externalists because they reject the assumption, characteristic of classi-
cal (or pre-Gettier) internalism, that the additive that turns true belief
into knowledge must be accessible within the subject’s perspective.

To make the difference vivid (and determine whether your own

proclivities are internalist or externalist) consider the following scenario.
Cheech and Chong both wake up to the apparent sound of their alarm
clock buzzing, and both form the belief that their alarm is buzzing.
Now Cheech is woken by his real alarm clock actually buzzing. Chong,
in contrast, has been abducted during the night by technologically
advanced Alpha Centaurians, who have drugged him (needlessly),
taken him to a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri, and put his brain in
a vat, wiring it to a computer which is able to replicate precisely the
brain’s being in its old body back in the Haight. Chong’s ‘virtual real-
ity’ will, by their advanced technology, be as vivid and complete as
Cheech’s real experience. The wiring completed, the computer now
sends Chong’s brain the same electrical signals that it would have
received waking up to the sound of his alarm clock. Chong’s belief, we
finally note, happens to be true, for just as Chong wakes up, a child
Alpha Centaurian has wandered into the lab, carrying Chong’s alarm
clock, which her father had brought back as a little present. She drops

Stephen J. Wykstra

the alarm, and it goes off at just the moment that Chong, groggily
waking up to the computer-generated sound of an alarm clock, forms
the belief ‘My alarm clock is ringing.’ By coincidence, Chong is thus
forming a true belief.

Now though Chong’s belief is true, most of us would intuitively say

that in this situation he does not have knowledge that his alarm clock is
ringing. The revealing question is what saying this will incline us to
say about Cheech, waking up back on earth to the real sound of his
alarm clock ringing. If we say that Chong’s belief is not knowledge, can
we still affirm that Cheech’s belief is knowledge? Classical internalism
creates an extremely strong conceptual pressure to answer ‘No, we
cannot affirm this.’ For internalism holds that the justifiers that make
true beliefs ‘knowledge’ must be things to which the believing subject
has access. But in our scenario, Cheech has access to no more or better
justifiers than does Chong. Both Cheech and Chong, after all, have the
same range and quality of sensations, sensations of waking in a room
to the sound and sight of their familiar alarm clocks. There is nothing
in his experience to which Cheech can point that is not also available
to Chong. Internalistically, the two are on epistemic par; the internalist
will thus want to treat them identically. Given our initial judgement
that Chong’s ‘justifiers’ do not make his belief knowledge, it will then
strongly seem, if we are classical internalists, that Cheech’s justifiers
cannot make his belief knowledge either.

Externalism, in contrast, allows one to treat the two cases differently.

For Cheech’s belief is in fact produced by the normal causal process,
whereas Chong’s is not. Externalists can thus say that Cheech has
knowledge while Chong does not, due to some evaluatively relevant
difference (say, in their objective reliability) between the two processes.
Whether this difference was accessible within the perspective or expe-
rience of Cheech or Chong is, for externalists, not important: what
matters is that the difference is actually there. If it is there, then by
externalist’s lights, Cheech’s true belief can be knowledge though
Chong’s is not.

Would externalists then see Cheech as justified in his belief, but

Chong as unjustified? This is a bit tricky. Sometimes philosophers sim-
ply stipulate that they will use ‘justified’ as the technical term for that
epistemic additive, whatever it is, that turns true belief into knowledge.
In that event the answer would be ‘Yes’. But as Alston and Plantinga
have taught us, the word ‘justification’, as used in ordinary English, is
laden with connotations of doing as one ought. Externalists do not
deny that beliefs can be evaluated with respect to this; they insist only

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Stephen J. Wykstra

that this is not what turns true belief into knowledge. Perspicacious
externalists thus give a new name for this further thing (warrant,
epistemic adequacy, positive epistemic status, Special K), allowing us to
retain the old terms (rationality, reasonableness, being justified, and so
on) for subject-focused dimensions. In any case, externalists are not
offering an account of what is ordinarily called being justified; they are
offering an account of something else, and are claiming that it is this
something else that turns true belief into knowledge. As they see it,
Chong’s belief is just as justified (rational) as Cheech’s belief: it fails to
be knowledge, not because it lacks rational justification, but because it
lacks warrant.

But will the two be entirely unrelated? Here, I think, many external-

ists have gone overboard. Externalism says that what soups a true belief
up into knowledge is warrant – a relationship of ‘positive epistemic
hook-up’ between the knowing subject and the known object. But a
right-headed externalism, as I see it, will insist that this positive epis-
temic hook-up depends on things going sufficiently right at both the
subject pole and object pole, not just at the latter. Things going right
at the subject pole, especially with respect to how epistemically mature
subjects can be expected to perform, given what they have access to,
are matters of rationality and justification. On a right-headed account,
as I see it, Chong’s being sufficiently rational in his believing will
remain a necessary condition for his belief’s having warrant; it is just
not a sufficient condition.

Sensible evidentialism

Let us now return to our question. All of us are evidentialists about
some things, like belief in electrons: we intuitively regard electron-
belief as needing (in a communitarian sense) evidence. But for the sake
of what is this needed? We can now propose that it is needed for the
sake of electron-beliefs having warrant (or Special K). We have just seen
that a belief can lack warrant due to malfunction either at the subject
pole (which typically involves irrationality) or at the object pole
(which need not). If Gretel is a victim of the Copenhagen Con, the
malfunction arises at the object pole. Gretel could thus be entirely
rational in believing in electrons; nevertheless, the evidentialist (about
electrons) will want to say that her belief is epistemically defective
(it lacks warrant), due to a dreadful malfunction at the object pole
outside her cognitive access. This, I propose, captures with some fidelity
what our evidentialism about electrons comes to: about electrons, we

are warrant-evidentialists, not rationality- (or entitlement-) evidentialists.
Rationality-evidentialism about electrons is, as the case of Gretel helps
show, a thoroughly extravagant position. (The denial of this position
is, accordingly, rather uninteresting.) But warrant-evidentialism about
electrons is not only truer to our intuitions, it is also a far more sensi-
ble position. I hereby dub it sensible evidentialism.

But now let us suppose that theistic evidentialists, all along, have

meant to say about belief in God the same thing that we, all along, have
meant to say about belief in electrons. They have not been rationality-
evidentialists; they have been warrant-evidentialists. (Of course they
have often sounded like rationality-evidentialists; but we have sounded
the same way talking about electrons. They, like us, did not after all have
the distinctions we now have, between rationality and warrant; so they
could express their evidentialist intuitions only through a glass darkly.)
The Reformed epistemologists, in all their brush-clearing, have criticized
only rationality-evidentialism. But they have never, so far as I can see,
sought to clarify what evidentialism about electrons might look like, and
to ask whether that might be what evidentialists about God are also
trying (in their philosophically juvenile way) to say. In this respect,
they have indeed treated evidentialism as a polemical partner.

What is inferential evidence?

Sensible evidentialism, I have argued, holds that beliefs which need
inferential evidence need it in a communitarian way (not an individu-
alistic way), and need it for the sake of warrant (not for the sake of
rationality). I now turn to one last question: What is this ‘inferential
evidence’, that we may need it? Reformed epistemologists, it seems to
me, have worked with rather impoverished notions of inferential evi-
dence; I shall propose that this is because they, like the evidentialists
they criticize, have fallen under the spell of strong foundationalism.
Taking Reid and externalism seriously, as they ask to do, should lead us
to expand our notion of inferential evidence.

Consider again Plantinga’s 14-year-old theist, brought up to believe

in God in a community where everyone so believes. He believes what
people tell him about God, but, says Plantinga (1981, p. 33) he ‘does
not take what people say as evidence’. For:

he does not reason thus: everyone around here says that God loves
us and cares for us; most of what everyone around here says is true;
so probably that’s true.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Instead, he simply believes what he’s taught. Plantinga says Hansel simply
believes. He believes in a basic or non-inferential way, for, says Planti-
nga, he ‘does not reason thus’. But what would have to be involved, if
he were to reason thus, so that his belief would qualify as an inferential
rather than a basic one? Reformed epistemologists, it seems to me, usu-
ally suppose that three things would need to be involved:

(C1) He must explicitly and occurrently believe the propositions that

constitute his evidence;

(C2) He must have some insight or putative insight into a support-

relation between these occurrently believed propositions and the
belief he holds on their basis;

(C3) This insight or putative insight must play a significant causal role

in generating or sustaining S’s belief that God exists.

Reformed epistemologists, I believe, tend to regard inferential beliefs as
requiring these conditions. On C1, consider Plantinga’s recent discus-
sion of two sixth-graders, both believing that the earth is round. One
of them, we might as well keep her as Gretel, believes this on the basis
of evidence. (Perhaps she has, like Aristotle, noticed how sailing ships
drop over the visual horizon on a clear day: judging that this is best
explained by supposing that the earth is round, she concludes that
probably, the earth is round.) The other one, let’s keep him as Hansel,
also believes that the earth is round, but he, in his usual credulous way,
just trustingly believes what his teacher tells him. Now the beliefs of
both children, Plantinga says, may have warrant, but they get this war-
rant in quite different ways. Gretel’s belief B gets warrant by way ‘of
being believed on the (evidential) basis’ of some other belief, A, and to
get warrant in this evidential way, she ‘must believe A as well as B’.
Hansel’s belief, in contrast, gets warrant in a different testimonial way, a
way for which, Plantinga avers (1993b, p. 138), Hansel ‘need not explic-
itly believe that the testifier testifies to what he does’. That thought,
Plantinga explains, ‘may never cross his mind; he may be paying
attention only to the testimony’. Plantinga’s point is that the teacher’s
testimony may occasion Hansel’s forming a warranted basic belief that
the earth is round, without Hansel ever forming the belief that his
teacher has told him this. And in exactly this respect, as I read him,
Plantinga means to contrast Hansel’s warranted basic belief with
Gretel’s warranted inferential belief. (An inferential or non-basic belief
is one that is held on the evidential basis of other beliefs.) Hansel’s
belief is triggered by (or grounded in) testimony, not inferred from it: it

Stephen J. Wykstra

can thus get warrant from the testimony ‘without any explicit belief’
on Hansel’s part that the teacher has given this testimony. In contrast,
Gretel’s belief gets its warrant evidentially (or inferentially) from B; for
this to be so, Gretel, unlike Hansel, ‘must believe B’.

C2 says that for S’s belief to be inferential, S must have insight or

putative insight into a support-relation between the belief and its evi-
dential basis. But what is it to take some belief to support (or be good
evidence for) some other belief? Basicalists typically construe this as a
matter of having some argument that derives the one from the other.
Consider here a striking passage by Wolterstorff (1987, p. 76):

When I survey this gigantic intricate world, I cannot believe that it
just came about. I do not mean that I have some good arguments
for its being made and that I believe in the arguments. I mean that
this conviction wells up irresistibly within me when I contemplate
the world.

Now of course, Wolterstorff sees his conviction as due to his appre-
hending certain features of the world; he even specifies, and so has
explicit beliefs about, what these features are. It is, he says, a ‘gigantic
intricate world’; it is (he says a few lines later) ‘full of beauty and splen-
dor’, and so on. His belief in God thus satisfies C1. Still, he does not see
it as inferential, for he does not ‘have good arguments’ that get him
from these features of the world to theism. Wolterstorff, for this reason,
tends to think that his theistic conviction is not evidentially or infer-
entially based on his beliefs or apprehendings regarding the world’s
intricacy, splendour, and the like: it is triggered by them, but not infer-
entially based on them. To be inferentially based on them would
require him to have arguments, argument involving some rational
insight into support-relations between the world’s being intricate, full
of beauty and splendour and so on, and its being made by God.

Finally, C3. C3 can be illustrated by an example I heard some years

ago from Plantinga concerning his calculator. Plantinga believes that
his calculator is reliable; he also perceives that his calculator indicates
(under appropriate digital manipulation) that 1

;2:3. And he takes

these two things to support, by a good argument, that 1 plus 2 does
indeed equal 3. C1 and C2 are thus met for his belief that 1

;2:3.

Nevertheless, this belief is basic, not inferential. For his ‘calculator
argument’ is, in Robert Audi’s terminology, a reason for what he
believes (that 1

;2:3) without being a reason for which he believes

that 1

;2:3.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Stephen J. Wykstra

Calvinians as strong foundationalists

Now there is, no doubt, a non-null set of beliefs that have the three
features just adumbrated. But are these what make a belief ‘inferential’?
That is to say: if we are going to carve our beliefs into those that are
basic and those that are inferential, are these the features that should
guide our carving?

Well, what determines whether a certain way of carving the turkey is

a good way or not? Classically, what made ‘inferentiality’ of interest is
that it is one of those things that can confer, or help to confer, epis-
temic adequacy on a belief. Suppose we go along with this a moment,
and refer to a belief as ‘properly inferential’ when it gets its knowledge-
status by virtue of being held in some appropriate inferential way.
(Being ‘properly inferential’ will then be the counterpart to being
‘properly basic’, with the proviso that it is warrant rather than entitle-
ment that we have in mind by the catch-all term ‘proper’.) In asking
what it takes for a belief to be ‘inferential’, then, we will have one eye
on our conception of what this Special K is; for our question is really:
what must inference be, in order to confer on a belief this merit?

Now the Reformed Epistemologists have been tireless in asserting

that behind evidentialism lies the bankrupt Zeitgeist of strong founda-
tionalism, leading to impoverished conceptions of what beliefs can
be properly basic. When you lift an evidentialist, writes Wolterstorff
(1981, p. 142), you almost always find a strong foundationalist. I sug-
gest, in the same spirit, that internalistic strong foundationalism lies
behind these overly stringent constraints on what can count as prop-
erly inferential beliefs.

In its strongest forms, internalism holds that a belief-forming process

can turn a true belief into knowledge only if it meets two requirements:

(R1) It must be something to which the subject has privileged access –

something the presence of which is evident from within the sub-
ject’s perspective.

(R2) It must be something whose relevance to truth is evident to the

subject, so the subject can see that the presence of this feature
makes a claim worthy of assent.

These requirements say that positive epistemic status is conferred only
by things to whose presence and truth-relevance (respectively) we have
privileged access. (Here we could also bring in the ideal of acquaintance
that Wolterstorff has described.) But these requirements are clearly going
to generate strictures on what can be believed in a properly inferential

way, just as they do on what can be believed in a properly basic way: a
process can give rise to properly (that is, warrant-conferring) inferential
beliefs only if it meets requirements R1 and R2. And of course, having
a good argument (conceived along Cartesian–Lockean lines) meets
both requirements nicely. For such arguments rest on rational insight
into ‘relations of ideas’ (that is, into support-relations), and this is both
something one can tell from the inside that one has (meeting R1), and
something whose relevance to truth is also evident (meeting R2). So
the same internalism that generates strong-foundationalist strictures
on the criteria of proper basicality, will also generate these strictures
(C1, C2 and C3) on criteria of proper inferentiality. If a process does
not meet these conditions, a strong foundationalist will regard it as
non-inferential (since it is the essence of inferentiality that it be some-
thing that can confer epistemic adequacy on its products).

So let’s return to the Wolterstorff passage with which I began this

chapter. Wolterstorff’s bitter friend asks him ‘Why don’t you just scrap
this God business?’ Wolterstorff finds that his conviction, the convic-
tion that God made all this, wells up irresistibly in him as he surveys
the world. Reflecting on this conviction, he categorizes it as a basic or
non-inferential one; he can specify various features of the world giving
rise to his conviction, but he does not have good arguments from
them, to its being so made. But does this establish non-inferentiality?
It does, if you suppose that good arguments must involve, and provide,
rational insight into support-relations – a very natural supposition from
the internalistic perspective of strong foundationalism. On what it
takes for something to be properly inferential, I thus suggest, when you
lift a Calvinian, you almost always find a strong foundationalist.

How externalism loosens the strictures

But what if one is an externalist instead? Here one holds that what
generates warrant is, at least in part, something like Goldman’s ‘being
produced by a reliable process’, or like Plantinga’s ‘working in accord
with a design plan in appropriate circumstances’. Being externalist, we
drop the requirement that something can confer warrant only if the
believing subject has privileged reflective access to its presence or
truth-relevance. Can we not, in this event, drop some of the old stric-
tures (C1–C3) on proper inferentiality as well?

To make this suggestion more plausible, consider, after all, how we

evaluate scientific theories. It is widely agreed that given two incompat-
ible theories, T1 and T2, which both fit the empirical data, T1 can be
more rational to accept on account of its being more simple than T2.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Stephen J. Wykstra

When someone does accept T1 over T2, it seems clearly to be as a result
of an inferential process. But at the same time, it usually rests on a
simplicity-disposition that is barely conscious. Give science students a set
of pressure-volume data, and ask them to select between several propos-
als about how the pressure of a gas varies as a function of its volume.
Almost always, they will judge that the simpler function is more likely
to be true. But in a philosophy of science class, these same students
will initially often dismiss a proposed simplicity criterion with disdain:
theories, they will say, must be based on observed facts, not on some
wish for simplicity. So in practice, they choose, instinctively as it were,
in accord with a norm of simplicity; but they do not, initially at least,
feel comfortable preaching what they practise. It is only after consider-
able reflection that they come to articulate awareness and endorsement
of this simplicity instinct in their inferential practices.

Can the inferential include such ‘instinctive’ dispositions? I believe it

can. Copernicus’s theory-preference was certainly not a matter of mere
perception or memory or introspection; it was a conclusion, based in a
broadly inferential way upon apprehended considerations. As Copernicus
came to apprehend the simplicity of how heliocentrism explained vari-
ous data, he found the conviction that the earth orbits the sun welling
up irresistibly within him. He could specify the simple-making features,
calling the attention of fellow astronomers to them. But he did not
have good arguments from them that would persuade sceptical friends
like Osiander–arguments, that is, providing rational insight – into the
bearing of simplicity considerations on truth. His conviction was infer-
ential; it rested on inferential evidence; but proper inferentiality (like
proper basicality) can involve other dispositions besides the ones
privileged by strong foundationalism. Internalism makes this difficult to
swallow, because Copernicus’s inference does not rest on ‘rational insight’
into a support-relation between the simplicity and the verisimilitude of a
theory. Externalism, however, enables us to loosen these strictures on
inferentiality without compromising the capacity of inference to con-
tribute to warrant.

Conclusion

We thus must broaden our notion of inferential evidence. Reformed
Epistemologists have rightly urged that humans possess a rich array
of dispositions producing properly basic beliefs. These dispositions do
not need to be justified in terms of that disposition providing rational
insight of a Cartesian sort, in order to be worthy of trust, and to confer
warrant. Sensible Evidentialists here ask that the processes producing

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

inferential beliefs get parity of treatment. The rich complex of inferential
dispositions, every bit as much as the complex of non-inferential ones
that interacts with it, ultimately requires an epistemology of trust. And
this calls us to broaden our criteria of proper inferentiality, just as we
broaden our criteria of proper basicality.

And when we have appropriately broadened it, I think it will turn

out that there is more to theistic evidentialism than Calvinians have
seen. By this, I do not just mean that when we better understand what
is inferential, we will be able to develop better inferential arguments for
theistic beliefs. I mean that we will be able to discern inferential con-
siderations which have all along been playing key roles in forming, sus-
taining, and shaping the convictions of the theistic community. (This
would fit what my colleague Stephen Evans (Evans, 1990), appealing to
Newman’s account of the ‘natural inferences’ that play a role in ordi-
nary but mature theistic conviction, calls a ‘natural theology in a new
key’.) Paul, in his Letter to the Romans, says that God has made his
power and deity evident to us through the things He has made. But
how does God do this? It seems to me as, incidentally, it seemed to
Thomas Reid, that God does so by designing us so that our epistemic
access to essential theistic truths involves reliance on broadly inferen-
tial considerations. This does not rule out important roles for immedi-
ate justifiers. Jesus came, Paul says in Ephesians 2:18, that through him
we might ‘have access in one Spirit to the Father’: this access in the
Spirit may well have a non-inferential dimension that contributes
much to the warrant of our beliefs. Sensible evidentialists are grateful
to Reformed Epistemologists for providing a rightful place for these.
But sensible theistic evidentialists will urge that this experiential com-
ponent contributes best, when there is available to the community,
broadly inferential evidence for other larger theistic claims. For it is
these larger claims that provide the framework within which we inter-
pret the Spirit’s experiential work in our lives.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Voices in Discussion

D.Z. Phillips

G: The enlightenment ideal was that of a science of religion – a rational
religion. Locke and Kant loom large in this context. Locke thought that
every adult must see that belief is rationally grounded, and that ratio-
nal criteria could be used as a critique of extant religion. I’m told this
ideal continues to shape contemporary German philosophy of religion.

Reformed Epistemology rejects this demand. It rejects the ideal of a

rationally grounded religion, but does not reject rationality. Something
does not have to be grounded to be rational. This does not mean that
every religious practice is to be accepted as it stands. Much in it may
not be acceptable. But it doesn’t need the metaphysical grounding
provided by Locke and Kant. All this being so, I need to say more about
rationality.

We need to distinguish between three stages of Reformed Epistemology.

First, the papers which belong to the 1970s. Second, the publication of
Faith and Rationality in 1983 where the former arguments are given a
more articulate form, now influenced by Thomas Reid. The emphasis
was mainly negative, showing what Reformed Epistemology denied. It is
in a Dutch neo-Calvinist tradition. Its aim is not, like Augustine, to
understand a faith already given, but to work out a view of all things in
the light of faith. Clement of Alexandria would be an example of such an
endeavour. Third, after 1983 the emphasis is more positive: on warrant
and justification; application of these to particular features of human life;
and the bearing of one’s religious commitments on one’s intellectual and
non-intellectual life. It has never been the aim of Reformed Epistemology
to give a general account of religion or religious practices. Critics have
thought that it wanted to do more, but this is not so.

I ended my paper by trying to pinpoint the differences between

Reformed Epistemology and Wittgensteinianism in the philosophy of

religion. The latter seems to deny that ‘God’ is a referring expression,
that there is a ‘something’ which this word picks out. Bowsma was an
exception to this. I sometimes hear echoes of Kant in this view; some-
times I hear an insistence that one can only refer to what one can
point to; but I really don’t understand why Wittgensteinians deny that
we can refer to God.

N: Reformed epistemology is to Calvin College what logical positivism
is to Vienna. I feel like a country priest asked to criticize the pope. But
I’ve been an evidentialist since the age of fourteen. I think that the evi-
dentialist Reformed Epistemology attacks is a straw man. When I looked
at the stars I thought that the question of whether God had created
them could go either way. Why must rationality shun evidentialism by
saying, with Plantinga, that it all depends on what you regard as ‘prop-
erly basic’? Plantinga uses ‘evidence’ in the narrow sense of inferential
evidence. Reformed epistemologists say that when you look at a daisy,
or, better, a tulip, you find welling up inside you the thought that God
is present. Similarly when one is told that God was reconciling the
world to himself in Jesus Christ. These basic tendencies are innocent
until proved guilty, so we can go along with these doxastic practices.
That’s Calvinism.

But I think evidence is needed if I am asked to believe that matter is

composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. Other beliefs, such as
‘I have two hands’ are not believed on evidence. What about religious
belief? Does it need evidence in Plantinga’s narrow sense?

I agree that we need to get beyond the first two negative stages of

Reformed Epistemology to a consideration of warrant and justification.
So what is it for a belief to be rational? Rationality is a many splen-
doured thing, but to be irrational is to be culpable; it is not doing your
duty by the evidence. Reformed epistemologists rightly reject inferential
evidence, for belief in God is basic. It can be reasonable to believe that
God exists. So rational belief does not entail evidence. The same is true
in science where we choose to believe our teachers. We can see that the
claims need evidence, but we need not have gathered it ourselves.

The notion of warrant helps us to capture these complexities. It oper-

ates at a subject pole. To be warranted at the object pole, things must
be as the belief claims. But this warranting need not be something
actually done at the subject pole. Yet, someone in the community must
have done so. The need for evidence, then, is not that of a specific
individual, but that of a community. If we think of evidence in this
way, different types of evidence must be brought in.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

D: Since G has devoted a considerable amount of space to his disagree-
ments with C, I’m going to ask C to reply.

C: First, I want to comment on G’s claim that I have misunderstood
Plantinga. G claims that when you lift an evidentialist you find a strong
foundationalist. N responds that when you lift a Calvinian you almost
always find a strong foundationalist. Was Plantinga an exception? Not
on my reading of Faith and Rationality and the early discussions of it in
The Reformed Journal. It is clear in them that the relation of Reformed
Epistemology to foundationalism was a central issue; especially the
claim that there are only two kinds of foundational propositions, the
self-evident propositions of logic and mathematics, and the proposi-
tions concerning incorrigible sense experiences. Plantinga argued that
since there is no adequate criterion for proper basicality, theists should
not accept this restriction. The proposition that there are only two
kinds of foundational propositions, he argued, is not itself a self-
evident proposition. Thus, although a believer cannot demonstrate to
an unbeliever why he should place belief in God in the foundations of
his noetic structure, the latter has no good logical reason to prevent
the believer from doing so. Reacting to this in The Reformed Journal,
Jesse de Boer said: ‘While Plantinga protests that foundationalism
ought to be abandoned, what he in fact does himself is to add to the
foundations our belief in God. He calls this belief ‘properly basic’ and
so, by the sense of his own idiom, he stays inside the foundationalist
camp.’ G denies this, but de Boer’s kind of point led to distinctions
being made between classical foundationalism – the view that there are
only two kinds of foundational propositions – and foundationalism.

G argues that the idiom of ‘proper basicality’ must not be used to

mean ‘foundations’. Plantinga did not take this advice. Here he is in the
battle for foundations: ‘On this view every noetic structure has a founda-
tion; and a proposition is rational for S, or known by S, only if it stands
in the appropriate relations to the foundations of S’s noetic
structure … Might it not be that my belief in God is itself in the foun-
dations of my noetic structure? Perhaps it is a member of F, in which
case, of course, it will automatically be evident with respect to G.’
Again, here is Plantinga responding to a classical foundationalist: ‘He
means to commit himself to reason and to nothing more – belief in
God, for example – in its foundations. But here there is no reason for
the theist to follow his example; the believer is not obliged to take his
word for it. So far we have found no reason at all for excluding belief
in God from the foundations.’

D.Z. Phillips

No doubt Reformed Epistemology has now gone in somewhat different

directions. G says that by ‘basic belief’ Plantinga means what he means
by ‘immediate belief’. Perhaps – and here I speculate, G was always less
enamoured with relations between ‘immediate belief’ and ‘foundational
basicality’ than Plantinga, in which case his present comments could be
seen as an exercise in damage limitation in this area.

G gives the impression that my criticisms depend entirely on the

issue of foundations. This is not so. I spend an equal amount of time
criticizing the notion of ‘immediate belief’ and its relation to authentic-
ity. I criticize, on grounds of logic, the fatal slide from the fact that an
individual need not, in fact, check the authenticity of an experience, to
the claim that the experience is self-authenticating. Plantinga conflates
psychological and logical considerations, as when he claims that the
self-evidence of mathematical propositions must be relativized to
persons. Whether an individual grasps a mathematical proposition
does not affect its logical status as a proposition – that is determined by
the arithmetical system. No matter what mathematical intuitions one
may have one must still pass the examination. No matter what religious
intuitions one may have, the spirits are tested to see whether they are
of God in the wider religious practice. There are differences between
these cases, and no doubt between them and examples discussed in On
Certainty, but they do not affect the logical point at issue. All these
points and quotations are made in Faith after Foundationalism, and I am
disappointed that G does not address them.

Second, a word about G’s conception of the issue between Reformed

Epistemology and Wittgensteinianism: the question of whether ‘there
is any such phenomenon as referring to God’. He says that I deny this
and hold that there is nothing we can predicate of God for the simple
reason ‘that there’s no such being as God to refer to’. Hence the charge
that I give an atheistic account of religious language. G says that he
could cite passage after passage to support this view, but thinks it
otiose to do so for an audience such as this, whereas, ironically, J says
that I have pointed out the misunderstandings of claims like G’s ‘so
often and so forcefully that it would seem entirely otiose even to raise
the question again, if it were not for the fact that these rebuttals have
been so singularly unsuccessful in achieving their aim’. Why should
this be so? Because readers like G prefer to construct general theses and
propositions than pay attention to the detailed grammatical analyses
which have been offered by, for example, Rush Rhees, Peter Winch
and myself. It is only by ignoring these analyses and examples that G
can accuse me of being ‘remarkably chary of telling us why there

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

cannot be any such phenomenon as referring to God’. So let me
remind him of some.

Rush Rhees brings out the difference between talking about a human

being and talking about God. I may know Winston Churchill without
knowing that he is Prime Minister or a company director. I can point
to the ‘it’ of which these things are true – that chap over there. But,
Rhees says, ‘I could not know God without knowing that he was Cre-
ator and Father of all things. That would be like saying that I might
come to know Winston Churchill without knowing that he had face,
hands, body, voice or any of the attributes of a human being.’ There is
an internal relation then between love, grace, majesty, and so forth,
and God’s reality. It is not that these belong to a further something, a
thing, as in the case of a human being, but that these uses of ‘love’,
‘grace’ and ‘majesty’ are themselves the conceptual parameters of the
kind of reality God has – God is divinely real. G is wrong in thinking
that O.K. Bouwsma does not concur with this view. Bouwsma points
out how we can be misled by the indicative form of certain sentences
such as ‘Great is Jehovah’, ‘Jehovah reigneth’, into thinking that
they are bits of information, descriptions of an object called ‘God’,
whereas other sentences, such as, ‘Bless Jehovah, O my soul’, by their
imperative form, help us to avoid that misunderstanding. He asks
whether ‘High is our God above all gods’ is to be understood as ‘High
is the Empire State Building above all other buildings in New York’
and, looking at the state of philosophy of religion replied sadly, ‘I’m
afraid so.’

G thinks that I would go to the death rather than use the word ‘refer’

in relation to God. On many occasions I have said that this is not so.
With Rhees I have said that if not using it leads to trouble, if it leads to
the view that talking about God doesn’t mean anything, or if it leads G
to think I hold that all religious language is metaphorical – a view
I argue against in the last chapter of Faith after Foundationalism – or more
surrealistically, if he thinks that I have reduced ‘God’ to an exclamation –
then by all means keep the word ‘refer’. Only, don’t think you have
achieved any clarificatory work by simply putting the word in italics.
Consider: ‘I have a hole in my heart’, ‘I have palpitations in my heart’, ‘I
have God in my heart.’ By all means say that something is referred to in
all these cases, but it is not the word ‘something’ or ‘reference’ which
gives sense to these expressions, but the uses of these expressions, includ-
ing the uses of ‘in my heart’, which illuminate the grammar of ‘some-
thing’ and ‘reference’ in these contexts. Don’t fight over labels – look at
their use.

D.Z. Phillips

A final paragraph about the nature of philosophy. Wittgenstein

stands in a contemplative tradition which goes back to Plato. As N
says, G’s tradition offers, not a philosophy of religion, but a religious
philosophy. G says that his task is not that of seeking to understand a
faith already given, but ‘to develop history, sociology, philosophy,
political theory, and so forth, in the light of faith’. The nature of phi-
losophy is itself a philosophical problem and much of its history has
been spent discussing it. In Wittgenstein, we see a supreme example of
an attempt to teach us differences born of philosophical wonder at the
world in all its variety – the city with no main road. Thus it raises the
question of what it is to see all things religiously; whether that perspec-
tive is a theoretical matter. It would want to see what other perspec-
tives look like and what disagreement between them amounts to. It
would deny that philosophy underwrites any of these perspectives. It
seems that in Reformed Epistemology all subjects are the handmaid of
faith which has the final say. By contrast, from a contemplative tradi-
tion Wittgenstein says: ‘A philosopher is not a citizen of any commu-
nity of ideas. That’s what makes him a philosopher.’

F: I take G’s point that belief can be shaped by tradition, but can there
be competing basic beliefs? Nietzsche looked at the sky and concluded
that the whole is a great cosmic stupidity. The universe doesn’t even
know we are here. How do we solve these conflicts?

G: F is wary of religious authority. How do you see a person by religious
authority? This is where Reid on perception came to my aid. For
Descartes and Locke you begin with sensations and then infer the exis-
tence of the external world. For them, perception is reasoning by infer-
ence. Reid says that our sensations carry information about the
external world. We are so ‘hard-wired’ that we form beliefs on the basis
of these sensations, but that there is no process of reasoning which
enables you to do this. We are so constructed that we trust our beliefs.
There is no non-circular argument for doing so.

So Reformed Epistemology says that a religious perception of reality,

if things are working properly, would form an idea of God. Whether we
can find good arguments for this would be an interesting quest, as in
the case of sensations and the external world, but they can’t make the
transition in themselves. Now N says, ‘No. The proper analogy is not
between religious belief and Reidian perception, but between religious
belief and explanation in science.’

If we take the Reidian conception our beliefs will be due to our ‘hard-

wiring’ and to which concepts are available to us. The concept of a

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

computer may not be available to a tribe. So everything depends on
which concepts get formed.

I: You say that basic beliefs are non-inferential, but how are they
formed? What mediating factors make them possible? How do we
choose our basic beliefs? Are basic beliefs frozen for all time?

G: There are many modes of mediation, so no general talk will do. We
have to get away from the paradigmatic distinction between mediate
and immediate knowledge found in Locke. The use of warrant can
appeal to a variety of mediations which get us away from thinking of
the foundational aspect. In response to C’s earlier comments I will
admit that Plantinga is reluctant to come straight out and admit that
this constitutes a change.

O: How does the appeal to authority get going? Is there a necessary link
between Reformed Epistemology and the function of authority?

N: This depends on what claims are being made. I would never have
re-entered the Christian fold if I had simply been told to accept an
authority; for example, if I had simply been told, ‘Read the scriptures
and wait for conviction.’ I needed to read F.D. Bruce and the opinion
of other scholars about Biblical documents. Claims sometimes depend
on their work.

O: Does that apply to ‘God exists’?

N: A believer may have an inchoate sense of the evidence, in which
case philosophers like Swinburne can be of help.

G: But what is being appealed to here seems to be a blend of philoso-
phy and theology. It is essential to Reformed Epistemology that the
assessment of beliefs is carried on in the context of a living faith. If you
don’t accept this you will be attracted to a position like N’s. But if N
thinks that the Reidian view of perception is correct, why not apply it
to religion?

P: But what does a child know of this inner community which recog-
nizes the need for grace? Isn’t this a dogmatic, insular view which
doesn’t recognize the child’s situation, or the various traditions of dif-
ferent countries? Reformed Epistemology seems insular.

N: I think you’re right. The believer needs to be convinced not only at
the subject pole, but also at the object pole. He must listen to what
experts say about how things are.

D.Z. Phillips

Q: For sophisticated people, it is claimed, it won’t be enough to say ‘He
lives in my heart.’ But doesn’t a lot depend on that? What would a
neutral assessment of the evidence be like?

R: Well, it’s not enough for a belief to be merely in the air. A testimonial
claim can be as strong as its weakest link and indefinitely long. Some
claims go back to Christ. Don’t we get a strong grounding for these in
the community?

G: I’m not sure where N stands. At first he stresses the need for evi-
dence. But then he says that the inference can be highly intuitive and
need not be laid out by anyone. That would bring it close to unre-
formed canonical Reformed Epistemology. But then N adds that this
highly intuitive inference must be spelled out by someone in the com-
munity. But N would not make this added requirement in the case of
perception.

In conclusion, let me return to issues raised by Wittgensteinianism

and respond to C’s earlier comments. Take a phrase like ‘Father of all
things’. If C is prepared to say that this ‘picks out something’ to which
I can relate my hopes and disappointments, there is no dispute
between us.

H: But what if it said that sentences in Christian beliefs are not asser-
tions, but performative utterances. How does that affect their truth?

G: They may be performative or relational, but they are still statements
that address something. In ‘Bless the Lord O my soul’, the Lord is still
picked out.

C: But so far we have said nothing about the grammar of either ‘some-
thing’ or ‘pick out’ in this context.

G: Agreed. That is the point at which a detailed future discussion
between us would need to begin.

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Part III

Wittgenstein and
Wittgensteinianism

Wittgenstein and the Philosophy
of Religion

Stephen Mulhall

Wittgensteinian approaches to issues in the philosophy of religion have
plainly been amongst the most consequential in the discipline in the
postwar period. This is not, of course, because a general consensus in
their favour has been established; on the contrary, if anything unites
contemporary philosophers of religion, it is their deep suspicion of both
the specific claims and the general methodology of those of their col-
leagues who have adopted a Wittgensteinian perspective. Nevertheless,
it is rare to find a philosopher of religion who does not define her own
position, at least in part, by specifying the nature of and the grounds
for her rejection of work carried out under the Wittgensteinian banner.
In this respect, that work continues to function as an essential refer-
ence point in the discipline – something that can no longer be said of
many other fields of philosophical endeavour, even in the philosophy
of mind or the philosophy of language (where some of Wittgenstein’s
specific claims continue to attract interest, but the general method-
ological principles which anchor and account for them are barely men-
tioned, let alone specifically criticized).

Those better apprised of the radical subversion to which Wittgenstein

aimed to subject the discipline of philosophy can hardly be surprised at
the suspicion in which Wittgensteinian approaches to religion are held;
but they are bound to be intrigued by the way in which philosophers of
religion seem far less capable than their colleagues in cognate fields of
simply leaving those approaches behind – of treating their own suspi-
cions as adequate grounds for dismissing Wittgensteinian approaches
rather than as endlessly renewed incentives to re-examine them. It is
almost as if these approaches go with the territory – as if this perspec-
tive on the philosophy of religion resonates so intimately with some
barely registered but fundamental aspect of the domain of religion itself

that those fascinated by the latter naturally find themselves unable
definitively to dismiss the former.

Is this sense of paradox intensified or dissipated if we further note

that Wittgenstein’s own remarks on the philosophy of religion are van-
ishingly slight in comparison with the sheer mass of his remarks on the
philosophy of mind or of language? Should we conclude that philoso-
phers somehow find it easier to get beyond the former than to dismiss
the latter entirely, easier as it were to stumble over a few scattered peb-
bles than to vault over a mountain range? Or should we rather recog-
nize that the very paucity of Wittgenstein’s own remarks makes them
difficult to construe and hence easy to misconstrue? Seen in this light,
it may seem that what so many philosophers of religion stumble over is
not so much Wittgenstein’s few pebbles but the complex and ramified
edifice that has been constructed from them; it may be that what they
find objectionable is not Wittgenstein but what Wittgensteinians have
made of him. These opening impressions suggest a tripartite structure
for the ensuing discussion. I shall begin by examining Wittgenstein’s
own remarks on the philosophy of religion; then I shall look at the dis-
tinctive characteristics of Wittgensteinian approaches to this area; and I
shall conclude by raising some questions about what one might call a
religious interpretation of Wittgenstein’s general approach to philoso-
phy – about how one might attempt to account for the spiritual fervour
that so many have sensed in his writings.

Wittgenstein’s interpretation of religion

In attempting to elucidate Wittgenstein’s philosophical view of religion
and religious belief, we must bear in mind not only that his recorded
expressions of those views are very small in number but also that few
of them were recorded by him and none were originally intended for
publication (our sources consist of 20 pages of his students’ lecture notes

and a scattering of remarks in such miscellanies as Culture and Value

and Recollections of Wittgenstein.)

In other words, even these apparently

direct expressions of his views are in reality multiply filtered through
the memories, editorial proclivities and linguistic sensibilities of others;
even here, separating Wittgenstein from the Wittgensteinians is far from
simple.

The most systematically developed of these remarks (which is not to

say that they are very systematically developed) are presented in the
notes made of three 1938 lectures. Broadly speaking, the first lecture
emphasizes important differences between religious beliefs and beliefs

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

about matters of fact (historical and empirical matters); the second
emphasizes parallel differences between a belief in God’s existence and a
belief in the existence of a person or object; and the third explores the
significance of a belief in life after death, or in the immortality of the
soul. In all three cases, Wittgenstein engages in a grammatical investiga-
tion of these topics: he attempts to clarify the nature of religious belief by
clarifying the use of expressions of religious belief – the place of religious
concepts and religious uses of concepts in the lives of believers and
unbelievers.

What he claims to establish thereby grows from one fundamental

insight – the fact that those who hold to religious doctrines do not
treat those commitments in the way they would treat an empirical
claim. They do not regard them as hypotheses whose credibility varies
in accordance with the strength of the evidence in their favour, they
do not assign them degrees of probability, and so on. Even with what
appear to be historical religious propositions (for example, concerning
Christ’s existence and life on earth), says Wittgenstein, believers do not
treat them as they do other historical propositions. His point is not just
that a believer’s conviction in their truth appears utterly insensitive to
the kinds of ground for doubt and caution that she would apply to
other propositions about the dim and distant past. It is rather that,
even if propositions about Christ’s life in Palestine were established
beyond all reasonable doubt in just the way that (for example) some
facts about Napoleon’s life have been established, this kind of certainty
would not have the practical consequences in our lives that a religious
belief has. As Wittgenstein puts it: ‘the indubitability wouldn’t be
enough to make me change my whole life’ (LC, p. 57).

In other words, the divergence between the role played in our lives

by religious beliefs and by empirical beliefs is so systematic and perva-
sive that they must be acknowledged to be very different kinds of
belief. We would otherwise be forced to the conclusion that religious
believers generally act in a manner so ludicrously irrational as to strain
credibility: as blunders go, this would just be too big – certainly too big
to attribute to people who don’t after all treat weather forecasts in the
way they treat Gospel warnings about the Last Judgement. Neither, on
the other hand, would we want to say that religious beliefs are
obviously rational, as if it is obviously unreasonable to reject what faith
demands. Religious believers base matters of great moment on evidence
that seems exceedingly flimsy by comparison with the corroboration
they require before accepting claims of far less significance for their
lives; and ‘anyone who reads the Epistles will find it said: not only that

Stephen Mulhall

it is not reasonable but that it is folly. Not only is it not reasonable, but
it doesn’t pretend to be’ (LC, p. 58). It is rather that the evidence for
religious beliefs, the doubts to which they may be subject and the cer-
tainty they may command are not species of empirical evidence, doubt
and certainty. ‘[Religious] controversies look quite different from any
normal controversies. Reasons look entirely different from normal
reasons’ (LC, p. 56). From this contention, everything else Wittgen-
stein says in these lectures can be derived. His claim that the religious
believer and the atheist cannot be said to contradict one another in the
manner of disputants over an empirical claim, and his observation that
a belief in the existence of God plays a role entirely unlike that of a
belief in the existence of any person or object he has ever heard of
(buttressed by pointing out that, for example, our ways of employing
pictures of God do not include any technique of comparing the picture
to that which it depicts), simply reiterate at a more concrete level his
general claim about the difference between religious beliefs and empir-
ical ones. And his discussion of the role played by a belief in life after
death proceeds on the assumption that this is not an empirical hypoth-
esis about the relation of minds to bodies, and asks how such a claim
might play a role in the lives of those who make it; he suggests that
this role would be clarified if, for example, the believer connects the
idea to certain notions of ethical responsibility (for example, by relat-
ing the soul’s immortality to the idea of its being subject to judge-
ment). Here Wittgenstein attempts to locate one religious concept in a
grammatical network of other such concepts, and to locate that net-
work in the context of a certain way of living – thus returning us to
the opening theme of his first lecture in a manner that should surprise
no-one familiar with his general methodological claim that ‘to imagine
a language is to imagine a form of life’.

Most of the remarks about religion scattered through the miscellanies

I mentioned earlier could also be seen simply as developing this same
fundamental point about the divergences between religious and empiri-
cal beliefs. This is particularly evident with respect to two remarks from
Culture and Value that have attracted particular attention: God’s essence
is supposed to guarantee his existence – what this really means is that
what is here at issue is not the existence of something (CV, p. 82). It
strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a pas-
sionate commitment to a system of reference (CV, p. 64).

As the sentences immediately following the former remark make

clear, Wittgenstein is not denying that a belief in God’s existence is a
belief in the existence of something but rather that it is a belief in the

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

existence of some thing; he is denying that God’s existence is akin to the
existence of a white elephant, of a physical object or entity – specifically
in the sense that God (like the white elephant) might not have existed,
that the grammar of the concept of ‘God’ is such as to allow us to talk
of ‘what it would be like if there were (or if there were not) such a
thing as “God”’. As for the latter remark, it merely encapsulates
Wittgenstein’s claims in the lecture that religious believers orient their
existence as a whole by reference to what he calls ‘pictures’ – specific,
interrelated ways of interpreting and responding to the events and
experiences that make up their lives, ways that can only be understood
and explained in terms of religious concepts.

Strangely, however, much of the criticism directed at Wittgenstein’s

views on religion has been focused on these remarks rather than upon
the more detailed and systematic lecture notes from which they derive;
and that criticism has depended for its plausibility upon ignoring their
roots in that material, as well as their more immediate contexts. For
example, John Hyman, the author of the entry on ‘Wittgensteinianism’
(which is in fact an entry exclusively on Wittgenstein) in the recent
Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Religion,

finds both remarks

impossible to accept.

The former, he claims, is not supported either by

the disanalogy between ‘God exists’ and existential propositions in
science or history or geography, or by the doctrine that God cannot
begin or cease to exist. ‘If Democritus believed that atoms cannot
begin or cease to exist, it does not follow that he did not believe that
an atom is “eine Existenz” – an entity, or something which exists’
(IWM, p. 261).

The difficulty with this argument is its extreme compression, or rather

its apparent assumption that we can tell what exactly Democritus’s
beliefs about atoms amount to without far more information about
their implications. In the first place, does his belief that atoms can
neither begin nor cease to exist amount to a belief in their eternal
existence or a belief in their endless duration (to employ a distinction
of Norman Malcolm’s, overlooked by Hyman despite his favourable
citation of some of Malcolm’s other remarks in the same essay)?
A physical object or object-constituent might come into being at the
beginning of the universe and remain in existence until its end; but its
non-existence would remain conceivable, and hence its endless dura-
tion would be no less contingent than that of a particular white
elephant. God’s existence, by contrast (as a Kierkegaardian remark also
quoted by Hyman asserts), is eternal: his existence is not just unending
but necessary. Until we know which of these conceptions of atomic

Stephen Mulhall

existence Democritus favours, we cannot assess its validity as a counter-
example, since an endlessly enduring atom would deserve the epithet
‘eine Existenz’ as Wittgenstein deploys it in a way that an eternal atom
would not.

Second, even if Democritus does turn out to believe that atoms have

eternal existence, whilst still being inclined to call both atoms and white
elephants ‘existent things’, this would not show that the kind of exis-
tence possessed by empirical things and that possessed by eternal beings
was identical. On the contrary; the fact that Democritus conceives of
atoms in such a way as to exclude certain possibilities that he leaves
open with respect to elephants (and vice versa) precisely implies that
the kind of existence he attributes to the former is very different from
that which he attributes to the latter. Whether or not he (or we) would
want to call both ‘entities’ or ‘existent things’ is entirely irrelevant;
what matters is not our inclination to use the same phrase in both con-
texts when we give expression to our beliefs, but whether or not we
put it to the same kind of use.

Hyman’s objections to the second remark culled from Culture and

Value are equally unsound. … I see no reason to accept that coming to
believe that God exists is nothing but coming to feel ‘a passionate com-
mitment to a system of reference’ – that is, coming to feel committed to
leading a life in which questions will be asked, obligations will be
acknowledged, decisions taken and actions performed, which can only
be explained or understood by the use of religious concepts. For surely,
if a convert makes that commitment, perhaps because he feels com-
pelled to, his belief that God exists will typically be part of his reason for
doing so. Nothing in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, and in particular
no part of his doctrine about the relation between language and forms of
life, implies that a form of life cannot involve historical or metaphysical
beliefs (such as that Jesus rose from the dead or that the soul is immor-
tal) as well as concepts and attitudes: all of them – beliefs, concepts and
attitudes – in a mutually supporting relation (IWM, p. 260).

Note to begin with that Wittgenstein does not claim that coming to

believe that God exists is nothing but a passionate commitment to a
system of reference; he claims that ‘a religious belief’ could only be
something like such a commitment. One might legitimately question
Wittgenstein’s implication that there is only one possible way of
understanding or living out a religious life; but to say that ‘x is some-
thing like y’ is plainly not equivalent to saying that ‘x is nothing but y’.
Furthermore, to equate a belief in God’s existence with religious belief
per se makes sense only on the assumption that a religious belief or

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

religious faith is nothing but (either reducible to or founded upon) a
belief in the existence of God – as if adopting a religious form of life is
a secondary consequence of a logically prior and logically independent
existential belief. And indeed, just such a model is presupposed by the
objection Hyman then goes on to make to Wittgenstein’s claim: he
asserts that a belief in God’s existence is typically one’s reason for com-
mitting oneself to a religious frame of reference.

But this assertion takes it for granted that we know what such a

belief amounts to or signifies – what the claim to believe that God
exists (or more plausibly, the claim to believe in God) actually means.
And on Wittgenstein’s view, we can only establish this by determining
how the concept of God functions in the practice and life of a religious
believer, which means investigating the grammatical connections
between this concept and the multitude of other religious concepts in
terms of which a believer interprets the events and experiences of her life.
But if, according to this approach, no-one can so much as understand
what a belief in God’s existence amounts to without grasping the loca-
tion of that concept in the grammatical network of religious concepts
that Wittgenstein here describes as a system of reference, it makes no
sense to think that one can first establish the truth of that belief and
then use it as a reason for adopting the system of reference. On the
contrary, one could not acquire a belief in God’s existence without
both understanding and committing oneself to the broader grammati-
cal system in which the concept of God has its life. Consequently,
Hyman’s objection to Wittgenstein’s remark simply begs the question
against Wittgenstein’s whole approach – not only to the philosophy of
religion but to philosophy in general.

It is worth noting that Hyman is also wrong to imply that this

approach entails eliminating either the specific belief in God’s existence
or the very idea of religious belief more generally from our conception
of what goes to make up a religious way of life. On the contrary, his
claim that religious faith involves a mutually supporting relation of
beliefs, concepts and attitudes is perfectly consistent with Wittgenstein’s
position. For first, claiming that the concept of God forms part of
a system of religious concepts does not entail reducing that concept
to the other concepts to which it is related, any more than noting the
grammatical relations between psychological concepts and concepts
of behaviour entails reducing the concept of pain to that of pain-
behaviour; the concepts are internally related, not synonymous.
Neither does Wittgenstein’s emphasis on the system of religious concepts
entail denying that religious faith involves a multitude of specific beliefs;

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101

on the contrary, that system of concepts is what makes it possible for
believers to give expression to their beliefs, and it is in part through that
system and the linguistic expressions it makes possible that religious atti-
tudes make themselves manifest. Whether we want to say with Hyman
that such religious beliefs are ‘historical and metaphysical’ depends on
precisely what these modifying adjectives imply, and whether they are
meant to constitute an exhaustive classification. Wittgenstein offers us
reason to doubt whether religious historical beliefs are like other kinds
of historical belief; and whilst we have no reason to expect metaphysi-
cal beliefs to be any less liable to influence the religious thinking of
human beings than their moral or scientific thinking, we have as
yet no reason to think that they are ineliminable or dominant. This
question, however, raises issues that can be more fruitfully pursued by
examining the uses to which Wittgensteinians have put Wittgenstein’s
own insights.

Before we go on to that section of the paper, however, I would like to

conclude by pointing out that the fundamental observation from
which the rest of Wittgenstein’s claims derive – the idea that religious
beliefs are very different from empirical beliefs – is itself hardly original.
For it amounts to no more than a reiteration of the core argument in
Part I of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous text Concluding Unscientific
Postscript,

which comprises chapters in which Climacus examines the

objective question posed by Christianity and concludes that religious
beliefs cannot be a species of historical belief because ‘the greatest
attainable certainty with respect to anything historical is a mere
approximation’. Of course, Wittgenstein restates this claim in his own
terms, and thereby eliminates from it Climacus’s dubious assumption
that there can be no such thing as certainty with respect to historical
beliefs; but the core of his idea remains untouched, and other themes
from the Postscript (passion, indirect communication, despair) pervade
the long paragraph from which Wittgenstein’s remark about religious
belief as a commitment to a system of reference is taken.

It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a

passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s
belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passion-
ately seizing hold of this interpretation. Instruction in a religious faith,
therefore, would have to take the form of a portrayal, a description, of
that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal to
conscience. And this combination would have to result in the pupil
himself, of his own accord, passionately taking hold of the system of

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

reference. It would be as though someone were first to let me see the
hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of rescue
until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I
ran to it and grasped it (CV, p. 64).

But of course, these themes will have been familiar to theologians

and philosophers of religion for a number of years – they constitute a
long-recognized mode of understanding Christianity and its relation
to morality and philosophy, one which is certainly not universally
accepted but which is equally certainly taken to be a substantial and
respectable theological option, and which long pre-dates any influence
Wittgenstein’s writings and teaching have exerted. Why, then, when
Wittgenstein restates these familiar themes, should they have elicited
such an apparently undismissable intensity of interest and hostility
from philosophers of religion? Perhaps an examination of the work of
those influenced by Wittgenstein’s remarks will help to account for
this otherwise puzzling phenomenon.

Wittgensteinian interpretations of religion

Ever since the publication of Kai Neilsen’s article entitled ‘Wittgenstein-
ian Fideism’,

certain fundamental misunderstandings about the nature

of Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion have embedded themselves
seemingly beyond recovery in the collective philosophical unconscious.
Writers influenced by Wittgenstein – particularly D.Z. Phillips – have
identified and attempted to rebut these misconceptions so often and so
forcefully that it would seem entirely otiose even to raise the question
again, if it were not for the fact that these rebuttals have been so singu-
larly unsuccessful in achieving their aim of clarifying the true implica-
tions of the Wittgensteinian approach. What I want to do, then, is look
at this issue one more time – not so much with the aim of trying to
settle the dispute, but in order to try to understand a little more clearly
why we seemed doomed endlessly to repeat the dance of mutual mis-
understanding that this dispute now seems destined to embody.

What makes the ineradicability of the term ‘Wittgensteinian Fideism’

so puzzling is that its users manage thereby to imply two radically con-
tradictory lines of criticism simultaneously. The first is that Wittgen-
steinian approaches illegitimately render traditional religion immune
to criticism; the second is that they illegitimately criticize traditional
religious attempts to justify faith. Nielsen’s original article focuses on

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103

the former line of argument, claiming that according to certain followers
of Wittgenstein:

[Religion] can only be understood or criticised, and then only in a
piecemeal way, from within this mode by someone who has a par-
ticipant’s understanding of this mode of discourse. To argue ... that
the very first-order discourse of this form of life is incoherent or
irrational can be nothing but a confusion, for it is this very form
of life, this very form of discourse itself, that sets its own criteria of
coherence, intelligibility or rationality. Philosophy cannot rele-
vantly criticise religion; it can only display for us the workings, the
style of functioning, of religious discourse. (WF, p. 193)

Hyman’s article includes a trenchant version of the latter line of

argument.

[S]ince evidence and argument are not the exclusive property of
science, Wittgenstein cannot be right to insist that if we try to prove
or support the proposition that God exists, we are treating religion
as if it were science, and are therefore already trapped in confusion.
It would, I think, be a mistake to maintain that because Anselm and
Aquinas sought to prove the existence of God, they were peddling a
variety of pseudo-science, a superstition which has nothing to do
with religious faith. (IWM, p. 261)

It is certainly difficult to see how anyone could maintain both lines

of argument simultaneously; but might not one or the other of them
nevertheless be sound?

It must be admitted at once that the ways in which some Wittgen-

steinians have expressed themselves has helped to give some founda-
tion to the first of these lines of criticism. For example, Hyman is
rightly critical of D.Z. Phillips’s recently expressed, incautious but
revealing claim that:

If the notion of an inner substance called ‘the soul’ is the philo-
sophical chimera we have suggested it is, whatever is meant by the
immortality of the soul cannot be the continued existence of such a
substance. (DS,

p. 237)

Since, as Hyman says, there is no obvious reason why it should be
impossible to espouse, sincerely and seriously, demonstrably incoherent

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

doctrines, Phillips’s inference is plainly invalid; and the fact that he
failed to notice this plausibly suggests that he has a tendency to assume
that religious beliefs and forms of life are essentially not illusory (if not
necessarily beyond criticism). Nevertheless, such remarks can and should
be dismissed as incidental slips unless it can be demonstrated that a
similar tendency infects principles that are at the heart of the Wittgen-
steinian approach to the philosophy of religion; and we have good
reason for thinking that they are not.

For example, D.Z. Phillips has repeatedly argued that Nielsen’s worries

are entirely unfounded, because they fail to acknowledge that Wittgen-
steinian analyses of religious belief work not by isolating religious
discourse and practice from the rest of human experience and life but
by relating them to it. The process of clarifying the meaning of a reli-
gious concept certainly involves relating that concept to other religious
concepts, and to the attitudes and beliefs that go to make up a religious
way of life; but it also involves relating that system of concepts, atti-
tudes and beliefs to more general human phenomena. Praying to God,
for example, makes sense only because human life includes experiences
and events for which God might intelligibly be thanked, desires and
purposes about which petitions might be made, and actions and
thoughts which might intelligibly form the subject of a confession or
request for absolution. It is precisely because religious faith can be pre-
sented as one way of responding to the ordinary problems, perplexities
and joys which most people experience at some point in their lives
that it has the importance it does have for so many people.

Insofar as it presents a religious system of reference in its natural

setting like this, a Wittgensteinian account not only gives itself the
resources to make religious concepts intelligible to non-believers as well
as believers; it is also able to show that both groups have access to a
number of perfectly legitimate ways of criticizing or rejecting modes
of life that employ religious concepts. To begin with, religious systems
of reference contain their own distinctive terms of criticism. Even
setting aside the ways in which believers might discriminate orthodoxy
from heresy or blasphemy, there is also the category of superstition; it
is perfectly common for believers to criticize fellow-believers on the
grounds that their claims and actions manifest what one might call a
magical or sentimental conception of the deity, and it is perfectly pos-
sible for those outside the relevant religious tradition to comprehend
and endorse such criticisms. Phillips, for example, makes much of
Wittgenstein’s criticisms of the scapegoat rite as described in Leviticus,
in the course of which he argues that the use of an animal to shoulder

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105

the people’s burden of sinfulness can plausibly be rejected as embodying
a confused and crude understanding of how freedom from sin might be
achieved.

However, Phillips also famously makes rather more external criticisms

of certain mainstays of traditional theological and religious thinking in
Christianity: I am thinking here of his critique of traditional solutions
to the problem of evil, or of the standard proofs of God’s existence.
Plainly, such criticisms presuppose a certain grasp of the nature and
significance of the religious tradition from which the beliefs and prac-
tices under criticism have emerged – how else can we ensure that those
criticisms are accurately aimed? But they do not use terms of criticism
that are generated or deployed exclusively by believers – importantly
because they depend upon invoking certain connections between
religious attitudes and the more general phenomena of human life.
Phillips’s critique of solutions to the problem of evil, for example,
depends primarily upon certain central moral principles concerning the
intrinsic and incommensurable value of human life, and upon certain
ordinary human responses to the suffering of others – principles and
responses that are plainly not the exlusive preserve of those within a
religious tradition.

Moreover, although Phillips does not make much of this possibility

in his writings, there is no reason why even more apparently external
modes of criticism might not be deployed against religious belief in
a manner consistent with Wittgenstein’s principles. For example,
Nietzsche’s suspicions of Christianity as embodying sado-masochistic
self-hatred, and Freud’s suspicions of institutionalized religion as pan-
dering to psychologically immature dependence on a father-figure
should both provide food for thought even for believers. They identify
new forms – or at least potentially illuminate new interpretations of
old forms – of religious pathology, and help to alert a believer to per-
haps unappreciated variants of the ills to which religious thought and
practice is heir.

Wittgensteinians would, however, be less comfortable with the idea

that such theories might legitimately be used to justify a wholesale
rejection of religious belief as such – exactly the kind of rejection
which Neilsen, for example, wishes to leave open. Here again, unfortu-
nately, this discomfort has been formulated – by Wittgensteinians and
perhaps by Wittgenstein himself – in potentially misleading ways.
Phillips, for example, quotes the following remark of Wittgenstein’s as
support for his claim that, whilst we can legitimately criticize certain
religious rituals as confused or superstitious, we cannot make the same

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

criticism of religious practices as a whole. It is true that we can compare
a picture that is firmly rooted in us to a superstition; but it is equally
true that we always eventually have to reach some firm ground, either
a picture or something else, so that a picture which is at the root of
all our thinking is to be respected and not treated as a superstition
(CV, p. 83).

The context of this remark makes it unclear exactly what Wittgenstein

has in mind when he talks of ‘a picture at the root of all our thinking’,
but it is surely plain that the inference he proposes is invalid if we
think of it in application to religious pictures. For from the fact that
certain religious pictures guide an individual’s life, and lie at the root of
all that she says and does, it certainly does not follow that they are
worthy of respect. Why, after all, should the depth or pervasive influ-
ence of a picture make it incoherent to judge that it embodies a
degrading or immature attitude to life? What is needed for me to make
such a criticism is, as Wittgenstein says, some firm ground from which
to evaluate the religious picture, a competing picture or something
else of the kind that is fundamental to my life; but such pictures are
precisely designed to provide a base from which to criticize opposing
pictures that lie at the root of other people’s lives. Indeed, one of the
key facts about religious pictures nowadays is that, although they lie at
the root of some people’s thinking, they do not lie at the root of our
thinking, of everyone’s thinking; hence, unlike the pictures to which
Wittgenstein appears to be referring, they are precisely open to criti-
cism and rejection.

There are, however, other and better reasons for baulking at the

thought of a wholesale rejection of religious belief as such; for such a
rejection would fail to acknowledge even the possibility that certain
versions of such ways of life might avoid the ills to which others
succumb. It is far from easy to see how there could be an a priori
demonstration that all possible ways of deploying religious systems of
reference are pathological, because that would amount to establishing
that it is impossible even to conceive of a way of using those concepts
as part of a form of life that does not manifest the relevant attitudes
(of sado-masochism or immaturity).

These qualms become even more overwhelming when the critic

wishes – as does Kai Neilsen – to be able to reject a religious mode of
discourse as a whole on the grounds that it is incoherent or irrational or
illogical. There is, of course, no difficulty with the idea that someone
might regard religious belief as imprudent (like gambling) or oppressive
(like footbinding) or pointless (like motor racing); and given that the

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laws of logic apply to religious discourse as they do to any other, a
religious statement that is on the face of it logically incoherent (such as
‘God is three and one’) stands in need of an explanation which reveals
that this is not in fact so. But there can be no ground for assuming a
priori that such an explanation cannot be forthcoming; we have to look
and see how the statement functions in the relevant context before we
can establish what it means. And since any attempt to demonstrate the
global irrationality of religious belief as such must presuppose that the
religious discourse under criticism has a particular significance, it will
fail to apply to any actual or possible mode of employing that discourse
which confers a different significance upon it.

What, then, of the opposing weakness attributed to ‘Wittgensteinian

Fideists’ – their tendency not to render religious belief immune from
radical criticism, but rather to subject traditional modes of defending
religious belief to radical criticism? Note that the real issue here is not
whether or not Wittgensteinian accounts can consistently conflict with
what religious believers are inclined at first blush to say about their
beliefs and practices. As Phillips has repeatedly pointed out:

[T]he suggestion [that we should accept the believer’s gloss as the
last word on the issue] is baffling. These philosophers would not
dream of advocating this procedure elsewhere in philosophy. I can
be told any day of the week in my local pub that thinking is a state
of consciousness. Does that settle the matter? (WR,

p. 243)

A Wittgensteinian is committed, not to the defence of common sense,
but to the clarification of the grammar of the words in which common
sense and any other intelligible utterances are given expression. What
provides that clarification in the case of religious belief is not whatever
religious believers are at first inclined to say about themselves – that is
philosophical raw material, not its end-product – but rather how they in
fact employ religious concepts in the practices which go to make up
their lives. Any interesting version of this line of criticism must therefore
make out a case for the claim that Wittgensteinian approaches are com-
mitted to subjecting traditional religious practices to radical criticism.

Hyman’s way of developing this claim unfortunately begins from a

mistaken reading of Wittgenstein’s claims about this issue. His argu-
ment, as we saw earlier, runs as follows:

[S]ince evidence and argument are not the exclusive property of
science, Wittgenstein cannot be right to insist that if we try to prove

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or support the proposition that God exists, we are treating religion
as if it were science, and are therefore already trapped in confusion.
It would, I think, be a mistake to maintain that because Anselm and
Aquinas sought to prove the existence of God, they were peddling a
variety of pseudo-science, a superstition which has nothing to do
with religious faith. (IWM, p. 261)

In effect, Hyman assumes that, because Wittgenstein in his lectures
accuses one Father O’Hara of illicitly transforming religious belief into
superstition, then he is committed to accusing Anselm and Aquinas of
the same error. But what Wittgenstein actually objects to in O’Hara’s
approach is that he is ‘one of those people who make [religious belief]
a question of science’ (LC, p. 57); in other words, he treats a belief in
God’s existence as a kind of empirical hypothesis, and so treats God as
a kind of physical object or entity. So the criticism would only transfer
to Anselm or Aquinas if their attempts to defend or support religious
belief betrayed a similar tendency. Hyman thinks that they do because
he thinks that Wittgenstein regards any attempt to support religious
belief as tantamount to treating religion as if it were science. But this
is simply not true: Wittgenstein thinks that it would be as misleading
to present religious belief as reasonable as it would be to describe it as
irrational, but he does not think that there is no such thing as arguing
about or offering reasons for or against religious belief. On the contrary,
he tells us that ‘[religious] controversies look quite different from any
normal controversies. Reasons look entirely different from normal rea-
sons’ (LC, p. 56) – remarks which presuppose that there are such things
as religious controversies, and reasons for and against religious belief.

Whether or not Anselm and Aquinas fall foul of Wittgenstein’s criti-

cism therefore depends, not on whether or not they try to defend their
religious beliefs, but on how they do so – on whether or not they
involve treating God as a kind of physical object, or treating a belief in
God’s existence as a kind of empirical hypothesis. The simple fact that
these proofs tend to minimize as far as possible any reliance upon
empirical premises, and aspire to establishing certainty of a kind more
akin to that available in the realms of mathematics and logic than that
of science, suggests that there might at least be initial grounds for dis-
tinguishing Father O’Hara’s efforts from those of his illustrious prede-
cessors. And of course, Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion have
devoted much labour to the task of showing that, although traditional
proofs of God’s existence of the kind offered by Anselm and Aquinas
can be understood as versions of Father O’Hara’s kind of thinking, they

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109

need not be. Phillips’s analyses of the argument from Design and the
Cosmological argument are one example of this nuanced treatment;
but Norman Malcolm’s account of Anselm’s two versions of the Onto-
logical argument is perhaps the single most influential and impressive
example of this kind of Wittgensteinian work, since it aims to establish
that the whole point of the Ontological argument is to remind us that
God is not ‘eine Existenz’. Nevertheless, insofar as Anselm and Aquinas
or their followers have understood their proofs to be proofs of an
empirical hypothesis, and to have embodied such an understanding in
their practices, then they will indeed count as superstitious from a
Wittgensteinian perspective. And the critics take it that such a categoriza-
tion of certain religious practices and perspectives amounts to a species
of prescriptive revisionism, and so as antithetical to Wittgensteinian
descriptive methods – as subverting their claim to be merely describing
the practices and forms of life with language that are the focus of their
philosophical concern. Phillips has attempted to block this inference
by denying that such categorizations have any critical or revisionary
implications: ‘Whether a ritual is superstitious is shown in its practice.
Philosophy, in making this explicit, is not prescriptive’ (WR, p. 245).

This claim lacks any real plausibility, however. For of course, even if

the applicability of the concept of ‘superstition’ to a given practice can
be judged only by describing the form of that practice, the concept
itself has a primarily critical force, and criticism implies the need for
change: superstition is, after all, something to be avoided. So, if Phillips
succeeded in demonstrating to the satisfaction of a given religious
believer that some aspect of their beliefs, rituals or practices deserved
to be called ‘superstitious’, he would have given them the best possible
reason to alter it in the direction of a more genuinely religious attitude
to life. Such believers might well be grateful for the intervention. After
all, since all religious traditions alter over time (in part because of shifts
in the theological and philosophical understandings of their concepts
and practices), their adherents might actually come to embrace revi-
sionary accounts of their traditional self-understandings as embodying
a deeper understanding of the true nature of their inheritance. Any
such intervention would, however, undeniably be revisionary in its
consequences.

The charge of ‘prescriptivism’ cannot, therefore, be as easily dis-

missed as Phillips seems to think. But it is important to acknowledge
that Wittgensteinians are not here engaging in the business of using
one language game to combat another, deploying modes of criticism
that are entirely external or alien to the practices criticized – for the

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terms of criticism deployed are ones which form a more or less intimate
part of the system of reference under description. To put it in Phillips’s
preferred terminology: certain confusions in certain religious practices
are identified by reference to other aspects of what religious believers
say and do, both as part of their explicitly religious lives and as part
of their common moral and intellectual inheritance. Nevertheless, this
identification of confusion cannot be uncoupled from its critical or
prescriptive implications; and this does suggest that Wittgensteinians
must reconcile themselves to acknowledging that there is at least one
important sense in which their philosophical practice does not ‘leave
everything as it is’ – that it does not accept forms of life as given. And
since the terms of criticism employed (ones which identify confusions
as species of ‘superstition’, and so on) have their original home in reli-
gious or spiritual contexts, the question arises: is there a more than
purely coincidental relation between a Wittgensteinian philosophical
practice and religious forms of life? Why is it that a prescriptive
element in Wittgensteinian philosophy seems to emerge most explic-
itly and naturally with respect to religion?

Religious interpretations of Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein himself famously remarked: ‘I am not a religious man:
but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view’
(RW, p. 79).

This remark can only confirm the feelings of those who – in what

appear to be increasing numbers in recent years – claim to detect an air
of spiritual fervour throughout Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings,
both early and late. It has recently been the focus of a wonderfully illu-
minating discussion between two of the most highly respected mem-
bers of a group of philosophers whose work was heavily influenced
by Wittgenstein’s own thought – Norman Malcolm and Peter Winch;

and I would like to conclude this essay by exploring that exchange.
Even though its full elaboration was cut short by his untimely death,
Malcolm’s view of the matter is fairly clearly summarized at the end of
his essay.

[T]here are four analogies between Wittgenstein’s conception of the
grammar of language, and his view of what is paramount in a religious
life. First, in both there is an end to explanation; second, in both
there is an inclination to be amazed at the existence of something

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111

[language games, in the one case, and the world, in the other]; third,
into both there enters the notion of an ‘illness’; fourth, in both, doing,
acting, takes priority over intellectual understanding and reasoning.
(RPV, p. 92)

I think it is fair to say that Peter Winch’s tactful but relentless essay in
response to Malcolm’s own shows beyond doubt that both the main
elements and the overall approach of Malcolm’s analysis are seriously
awry. In particular, the claimed analogies can appear to hold only if
one fails to acknowledge not only critical differences between the sig-
nificance of similar words employed in very different contexts, but also
what Wittgenstein would think of as critical differences between philo-
sophical and religious approaches to phenomena in general. Thus, for
example, Winch points out that the first of Malcolm’s four analogies
runs together two distinct points of comparison – that the expression
of religious belief is itself a language-game for which it makes no sense
to ask for an explanation, and that for the religious believer within
such a language game a reference to God’s will signals ‘an end to expla-
nation’. But the former point holds of all language games, and so fails
to distinguish religious practices from any other; whereas the latter
precisely marks a disanalogy between philosophy and religion, since
no Wittgensteinian is, as it were, professionally committed to the view
that we must accept language games as they are because their existence
and specific form are manifestations of God’s will. On a more general
level, Winch is suspicious of the particular angle from which Malcolm
approaches the remark Wittgenstein is reported to have made, and
which his four analogies are designed to elucidate. For, quite apart
from the fact that our only evidence for its having been made is the
recollection of a friend, Winch is alert to the further fact that, as
reported, Wittgenstein’s remark identifies the religious point of view as
that from which he approaches ‘every problem’ – not every philosoph-
ical problem, as Malcolm presupposes. At best, therefore, it can be held
to characterize Wittgenstein’s relation to philosophical problems, and
so his philosophical practice, only insofar as it characterizes his rela-
tion to the problems of life as a whole – and not, as Malcolm assumes,
entirely independently of that general attitude. Nevertheless, Winch is
inclined to see that something important about Wittgenstein’s philo-
sophical practice is captured by the reported remark, and he ends his
response to Malcolm by sketching in his own interpretation of it. This
sketch is more than a little difficult to render consistent in places. For
example, after making a connection between Wittgenstein’s views of

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

religion and of philosophy by talking of the passion with which he
practises the latter, and noting that Wittgenstein follows Kierkegaard in
contrasting the passion of faith with the cold passionlessness of
wisdom, Winch immediately suggests that the Philosophical Investiga-
tions can be thought of as expressing Wittgenstein’s ideal of ‘a certain
coolness. A temple providing a setting for the passions without
meddling with them’ (CV, p. 2). In the end, however, the key point
Winch wishes to make emerges quite clearly: it involves a sense that ‘for
someone to whom philosophical issues matter, a lack of clarity about
them can have grave implications for his or her own relation to life’
(RPV, p. 130).

Winch illustrates his point by referring to a passage by Wittgenstein

on how the sensation of pain can have a relation to a human body.

But isn’t it absurd to say of a body that it has pain? – And why does
one feel an absurdity in that? In what sense is it true that my hand
does not feel pain, but I in my hand?

What sort of issue is: Is it the body that feels pain? – How is it to

be decided? What makes it plausible to say that it is not the body? –
Well, something like this: If someone has a pain in his hand, then
the hand does not say so (unless it writes it) and one does not com-
fort the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his face. (PI,

p. 286)

Winch’s commentary on this passage deserves quotation in full.

That last sentence gives me a wonderful sense of a fog suddenly
lifting; the confused shapes that loom up and disappear again in the
familiar philosophical discussions of ‘mind and body’ vanish and I
am left with a clear view of something very familiar of which I had
not noticed the importance. Its ‘importance’ lies in the first instance
in its relation to the philosophical discussion. At the same time in
attending to the minute detail that plays such an enormous role in
our relations to each other, my sense of the dimensions of those
relations is both transformed and enriched: when comforting some-
one who has been hurt, I look into the sufferer’s eyes. (RPV, p. 130)

I find this passage to be just as wonderful as the passage from Wittgen-
stein to which it is a response; but it seems to me that two qualifications
Winch imposes on the scope of its implications are difficult to justify.

First, we might ask: is it really plausible to restrict the transformation

and enrichment that Wittgenstein’s grammatical reminders can engender

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113

to ‘our sense of the dimensions of our interpersonal relations’? Winch
figures Wittgenstein’s insights as removing the fog which has blocked
my view of something entirely familiar; he thereby restricts the trans-
formation those insights produce to our understanding of our lives
rather than to what is thereby understood. The idea is that philosophi-
cal confusions reside exclusively in the views we take of our lives, not
the lives themselves. But this seems a particularly artificial distinction
with respect to grammatical reminders about psychological concepts.
Take, for example, Wittgenstein’s related reminders concerning the
commonly expressed philosophical view that no other person can have
exactly the same pain as me; Wittgenstein argues that this view depends
upon incoherently treating the possessor of the pain as a property of it,
and so manifests a false sense of our separateness as persons by imposing
a non-existent uniqueness on our experience. But the scepticism of
which this belief is the intellectual expression is also something that
can and does pervade our ordinary lives, affecting not just our sense of
the dimensions of interpersonal relations but the dimensions them-
selves. We can and do exist within this mislocated sense of our sepa-
rateness and commonality; we live our scepticism.

Winch’s second qualification finds expression in his claim that the

spiritual implications of grammatical unclarity apply only to those for
whom philosophical issues matter. This restriction is reinforced and
explained in a footnote, which reads: ‘I make this qualification since
I am sure that Wittgenstein did not – like Socrates? – want to make
philosophical clarity quite generally a sine qua non of spiritual health’
(RPV, p. 135). If we question Winch’s first qualification by questioning
the distinction between our philosophically expressed views of life and
our lives themselves, this second qualification will already look rather
implausible. But there are also independent grounds for concern; for
the second qualification seems to depend upon an equally artificial
distinction between those for whom philosophical issues matter and
those for whom they do not. First, if Winch’s own line of argument
is correct, there can be no-one who stands in need of philosophical
clarity for whom that clarity cannot matter; if you suffer from the
confusion, you need the clarity – that clarity matters to you – whether
you know it or not. So the distinction which his qualification really
presupposes must be one between those for whom philosophical prob-
lems arise, and those for whom they do not. But any such distinction
can be at best provisional, for there is no good reason to think that
there are any human beings who are constitutionally immune to philo-
sophical confusions; any creature complicated enough to be burdened

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

by language is necessarily vulnerable to such confusions. To be sure, a
given person at a given time might escape confusion, and so stand in
no need of grammatical clarity at that time; after all, one might almost
define a philosophical problem as one which is not always live for us,
but which, once living, is undismissable. But this temporary freedom
has nothing to do with whether or not one is a professional philoso-
pher, or well-educated, or an inhabitant of complex civilizations – as
Winch’s qualification seems to imply. The truth of the matter is that
philosophical confusions are not restricted to inhabitants of certain
disciplines, or sectors of culture, or classes within societies, or societies
as a whole. They are part of our inheritance as human beings; and in
this important sense, philosophical issues matter to everyone. If, then,
we contemplate pushing beyond Winch’s conclusions by removing his
two restrictions, but in the direction that those conclusions have
already sketched out, we might feel the need to inquire a little more
closely into the nature of the philosophical confusions against which
Wittgenstein sets the resources of his philosophical practice of remind-
ing us of what we say when, recalling us to the grammar or criteria of our
ordinary words. If such recalling is necessary, that must be because
our confusion has led us to go beyond those criteria – to lose control of
our words, to attempt to speak outside or beyond language games. But
how and why might we make such an attempt? Why and how can oth-
erwise competent speakers suffer such a loss of control when under the
pressure to philosophize?

We know that, for Wittgenstein, that over which they lose control –

criteria – constitute the limits or conditions of the human capacity to
know, think or speak about the world and the various things that are in
it: they are that without which human knowledge of the world would
not be possible. But of course, it is fatally easy to interpret limits as limi-
tations, to experience conditions as constraints. Indeed, this is precisely
how the sceptic often understands her own motives: she repudiates our
ordinary reliance upon criteria because she regards what we ordinarily
count as knowledge as nothing of the kind, as failing to put us into
contact with the world as it really is. But it would only make sense to
think of the conditions of human knowledge as limitations if we could
conceive of another cognitive perspective upon the world that did
not require them; and philosophers from Kant onwards have variously
striven to show that there is no such perspective – that the absence of the
concepts or categories in terms of which we individuate objects would
not clear the way for unmediated knowledge of the world, but would
rather remove the possibility of anything that might count as knowledge.

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115

In other words, what the sceptic understands as a process of disillu-

sionment in the name of true knowledge, Wittgenstein interprets as an
inability or refusal to acknowledge the fact that human knowledge –
the knowledge available to finite creatures, subjective agents in an
objective world – is necessarily conditioned. But it is worth recalling
that nothing is more human than the desire to deny the human, to
interpret limits as limitations and to repudiate the human condition
of conditionedness or finitude in the name of the unconditioned,
the transcendent, the superhuman – the inhuman. On this under-
standing of criteria, the human desire to speak outside language
games is an inflection of the prideful human craving to be God, and
Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice aims not so much to eradicate
this ineradicable hubris but to diagnose it and track down the causes
of its specific eruptions from case to case of its perennial, endlessly
renewed realization.

An interpretation of Wittgenstein’s method along these lines has

been most famously advanced and elaborated by Stanley Cavell, who
thinks of philosophy practised under such a self-understanding as a
species of perfectionism.

In Cavell’s thought, the unending sequence

of specific manifestations of scepticism in modernity reveals that
human beings are possessed of a nature in which the sceptical impulse
is (apparently) ineradicably inscribed. What is needed if it is to be com-
bated is a fully acknowledged relationship with a particular human
other (the philosopher, whether Wittgenstein or those who would
inherit his task) – one whose words have the power to identify and
make us ashamed of our present confused and disoriented state, one
who, by exemplifying a further, attainable state of clarity and self-
possession, can attract us to it whilst respecting our autonomy and
individuality. Now, measure this self-understanding against the follow-
ing theological structure. In Christian thought, our unending sequence
of particular sinful acts reveals that human beings are possessed of a
nature which disposes them to sin and prevents them from escaping
their bondage by using their own resources. What they need to attain
their new nature is a fully acknowledged relationship with a particular
person – one through whose words divine grace is made accessible, one
who exemplifies the further, unattained but attainable human state to
which God wishes to attract every individual whilst respecting her
freedom to deny its attractions and spurn His grace. Against this
background, it is not just a sense of the reality of our hubristic railings
against our finitude that links Wittgensteinian philosophy and religion,

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but a surprisingly detailed conception of its precise forms and of the
available ways of attempting to overcome them. The precision of the
mapping here might well be what underlay the third of the analogies
Malcolm wished to draw between Wittgenstein’s view of philosophical
problems and religious belief, and to which Winch devotes compara-
tively little attention in his response: that between the religious atti-
tude of regarding oneself as radically imperfect or ‘sick’ and the idea
that philosophical puzzlement is a symptom of a disease. It may be,
in other words, that some recognizable inflection of the notion of
Original Sin is more pertinent to the insight that Winch himself
began to develop than he was able to see, that he and Malcolm were in
this sense less far apart than may appear. Whatever the truth of this
matter, it seems at least arguable that if we are to attain a deeper under-
standing of Wittgenstein’s ‘religious point of view’, and attain thereby
a better grasp of the uncanny, undismissable intimacy between
Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion and religion itself, we would
do well to take seriously Stanley Cavell’s interpretation of the
Philosophical Investigations.

Notes

1. In Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, edited

by Cyril Barrett (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1966) – hereafter LC.

2. Edited by G.H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford:

Basil Blackwell, 1980) – hereafter CV.

3. Edited by Rush Rhees (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1981) – hereafter RW.
4. Edited by Quinn and Taliaferro (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) – pp. 150–8.
5. Instead of referring to his Companion entry, I shall use quotations from

Dr Hyman’s earlier paper ‘Immortality without Metaphysics’ (published
in D.Z. Phillips (ed.), Can Religion Be Explained Away? [London: St Martin’s
Press, 1996] – hereafter IWM), where he advances exactly the same lines of
argument. Since the original paper was presented at an earlier Claremont
Conference, this choice of reference point seemed best suited to the present
occasion.

6. Trans. H.V. and E.H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) –

hereafter CUP.

7. Philosophy XLII, No. 161, July 1967 – hereafter WF.
8. ‘Dislocating the Soul’, the essay to which Hyman’s own article ‘Immortality

without Metaphysics’ is a reply, is published in the same collection.

9. D.Z. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1993) – here-

after WR.

10. N. Malcolm, Wittgenstein: a Religious Point of View? (edited with a response

by Peter Winch) (London: Routledge, 1993) – hereafter RPV.

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117

11. L. Wittgenstein (trans. G.E.M. Anscombe), Philosophical Investigations

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1953).

12. Many of the key Cavell texts are collected in S. Mulhall (ed.), The Cavell

Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996) – see especially Essay 16 and the Epilogue.
Further elaboration and defence of Cavell’s interpretation of Wittgenstein
can be found in my Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) – see especially ch. 12.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Wittgenstein and the Philosophy
of Religion: a Reply to Stephen
Mulhall

Walford Gealy

I want to begin by congratulating Stephen Mulhall on his beautifully
written and solidly constructed paper. The title given, ‘Wittgenstein
and the Philosophy of Religion’ allowed the possibility of a wide
approach to be taken to the subject, and Mulhall has taken full advan-
tage of this space in his tripartite response. The excellence of some sec-
tions of his paper has rendered any further comment on them wholly
superfluous. I have particularly in mind those parts in which Mulhall is
critical of other writers, such as his penetratingly astute arguments
against John Hyman in both the first and second divisions of the paper.
However, no two people would have approached this set topic in the
same way, and there are some issues which I would have liked to have
seen given greater emphasis, especially the assessment of Wittgenstein’s
contribution to the philosophy of religion. But I also think that, in
some ways, Mulhall could have been more critical of Wittgenstein’s
own views on religion. I appreciate that these comments are, of course,
essentially evaluative, and I found it difficult to discover much that is
amiss with Mulhall’s logic. In my reply I wish to concentrate primarily
on the first part of Mulhall’s paper which deals specifically with
Wittgenstein’s own comments on religion, including those remarks
contained in the celebrated three lectures on religious belief, although
what I have to say about these has some bearing on issues raised in the
other two sections of Mulhall’s essay.

If the general question were asked, ‘What has Wittgenstein contributed

to the philosophy of religion?’ it would not be inappropriate, even for
those who have embraced his standpoint, to answer in two apparently
contradictory ways. On the one hand, it could be maintained that he
contributed next to nothing to the subject, while, on the other hand, it
could be claimed, with some considerable justification, that no one in

119

this century has contributed more to the discipline. On the negative side,
Mulhall refers to the ‘few scattered pebbles’ of Wittgenstein’s remarks on
religious belief – and it is indubitably the case that Wittgenstein wrote
very little about religion. And, in my view, what he did write, or perhaps
more accurately as a generalization, what he is reported to have said
about religious faith, appears to me to be largely unimpressive – partic-
ularly from a religious perspective – and, in philosophical terms, it is
certainly not representative of, or even comparable with, what is best
in Wittgenstein. His comments on religion often appear idiosyncratic
and banal, and, sometimes, plainly incorrect. On the positive side, and
in sharp contrast to the ‘pebbles’ alluded to, Wittgenstein’s work on
the philosophy of logic and language appear, in Mulhall’s own phrase,
like ‘mountainous ranges’, and for most Wittgensteinian thinkers it is
the implications of this logic that makes his indirect contribution to
the philosophy of religion so invaluable. Let us then look briefly at
these different ways of evaluating Wittgenstein’s contribution to this
field of philosophy, beginning with the positive aspect – the claim
that, arguably, Wittgenstein’s contribution to the philosophy of reli-
gion in this century is unparalleled.

Even though it is fashionable to distinguish between the various

philosophies of Wittgenstein, there is, throughout his thinking, one
central unifying preoccupation. From the very first he was solely con-
cerned with the issue of the intelligibility of symbolism or of language.
This concern with the nature of language or symbolism had developed
from his initial interest in mathematics and from his subsequent read-
ing of the works of Frege and Russell. As such, Wittgenstein’s thinking
forms part of a wider philosophical movement that became ultimately
responsible for placing logical considerations at the heart of philosoph-
ical activity, and that for the greater part of the twentieth century.
What this concern with logic displaced was epistemology – a discipline
which, in Wittgenstein’s earlier work, was relegated to the realm of
psychology, while in his later work, epistemology is seen to be, as most
other philosophical issues, the product of conceptual confusion. The
traditional general question, ‘What is the nature of knowledge?’ is both
misleading and ambiguous. It presupposes that there is such a thing as
the essence of knowledge. But Wittgenstein showed that what knowl-
edge amounts to depends on the context in which the claim to knowl-
edge is made, and on how things ‘hang together’ within that specific
context. So that to know myself, for instance, or to know what pain a
person is going through, or to know that Cardiff is the capital city of

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Wales, or that the chemical formula of salt is NaCl, or to know God,
are different forms of knowing, in the sense that each claim is connected
with different sets of concepts that go together – so that what can be
said or asked about each form of knowledge differs in each case. Or,
expressed in a different way, if one were challenged to defend one’s
claim to knowledge in any of these instances, the reply would be
different – to a greater or lesser extent. Wittgenstein’s exhortation that
we should consider if all games have something in common is equally
applicable to the concept of knowledge. And if we ‘look and see’ we
have to arrive at the same conclusion that we ‘will not see something
that is common to all, but similarities, relationships and a whole series
of them at that’ (P.I., para 65). Hence, traditional epistemological sys-
tems are confused attempts to get at the essence of knowledge – an
essence that simply does not exist.

When Mulhall refers to the ‘radical subversion to which Wittgenstein

aimed to subject the discipline of philosophy’ I suppose he was refer-
ring, at least in part, to this fundamental reorientation of the discipline
away from epistemology and towards logic. The impact of this change
is immeasurable: it displaced the central philosophical tradition that
had been rooted, certainly in Europe, for centuries. In Britain, for
instance, since the dawn of modern philosophy, the dominant philo-
sophical creed has been that of empiricism. From the middle of the sev-
enteenth century to the twentieth, almost without exception, leading
British philosophers (Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Bentham, Mill,
Russell and Moore) have been empiricists. Now, although Mulhall may,
sadly, be perfectly correct in stating that Wittgenstein’s work may no
longer ‘function as an essential reference point’ in many ‘fields of
philosophical endeavour’ (p. 1), those who have espoused the changes
initiated by Wittgenstein still perceive these as constituting the
strongest challenge to this established British empiricist tradition and,
indeed, to any other philosophical tradition that has an epistemologi-
cal theory at its centre. But it may also be the case that one reason for
the prominence gained by Wittgensteinian writers in the field of the
philosophy of religion is that the implications of the Wittgensteinian
critique of epistemological systems may be seen to be more effective in
this realm than in any other branch of philosophy. And there may even
be a straightforward reason for this, particularly when Wittgenstein’s
thinking is placed against the background of British empiricism. For,
more than any other system, an empiricist epistemology has difficulty
in accommodating claims to a knowledge of God. Even in its traditional

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mildest form, as we find it, say, in Locke, empiricist beliefs are never
easily reconciled with religious belief – despite Locke’s own claim that
Christianity is to be embraced on account of its ‘reasonableness’. The
gap between the claim about what can be known with certainty
through sensation and reflection on the one hand, and the claim to
know a transcendent Deity ‘whom no man hath seen’, on the other
hand, always has to be bridged within an empiricist epistemological
framework. And that bridge has never been satisfactorily or consis-
tently constructed. The recourse to some alleged experiences, such as
that of a ‘leap of faith’ or of some ‘intuitive disclosures’, does not close
the gap between experiences of an empirical nature and knowledge of
a God that is, in some sense, ‘beyond’ this visible, tangible world. And
neither is, in my view, what appears to be a more consistent position
from an empiricist standpoint, the claim that, on the basis of evidence,
the truth of the belief in God is a matter of high probability, religiously
satisfactory either. Of course, empiricism in its most virulent form, leads
either to a Hume-type form of scepticism or, to an equally pernicious
form of scientism such as that fostered by Logical Positivism from the
1930s onwards. In the second half of this century, both forms of
empiricism, the mild and the virulent, have still exercised considerable
influence, and I think that it is correct to say that the English have
remained true to what is, primarily, their tradition. And it is against the
background of a long-standing, resistant British empiricism that one
must, at least in part, assess the contribution of the later Wittgenstein
to the philosophy of religion.

The emancipation of the philosophy of religion from the constraints of

an empirical epistemological system was not Wittgenstein’s only contri-
bution to the philosophy of religion. Of greater importance was his insis-
tence on the indeterminate nature of the criteria of intelligibility. In the
Tractatus, Wittgenstein had attempted to lay down a single, absolute
measure of the distinction between sense and nonsense. But in the
Philosophical Investigations, it is maintained that it is not always that
easy to distinguish between sense and nonsense – and this is partly the
case because of the complexity of that distinction. In the Philosophical
Investigations, language is inextricably connected with our living, with
our day-to-day practices. The speaking of language is part of an activ-
ity, or a form of life’ (P.I., para 23). Hence, understanding language
means understanding what is going on – and vice versa. What it makes
sense to say, or not to say, depends on what is the precise nature of the
activity under consideration. And if our practices are so diverse and, in
principle, without any predetermined boundaries (as, for instance, old

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practices cease to be and are replaced by novel ones, and so there are
constantly new ways of speaking while others become obsolete), then the
criteria of the intelligibility are equally indeterminate. The boundaries
of intelligibility are in a constant state of flux. The expression, ‘This
language game is played’ encapsulates, possibly most directly, the new
freedom from the traditional kind of externally imposed, rigid, single
criterion of meaning – the kind of criterion that had been adopted by
philosophers in the past – with the inevitable consequence of artificially
limiting the possibilities of language. This does not mean that, accord-
ing to the Philosophical Investigations, anything goes – for there both are
standards within activities that determine what is meaningful and what
is not. But, also, of paramount importance is the fact that the activities
themselves are related to each other in a variety of ways. They form a
‘complicated network’ and, as a consequence, they have a bearing on
each other. In this sense, the intelligibility of one way of saying some-
thing is related to the intelligibility of other ways of speaking. No single
activity, completely isolated from others, would be intelligible. Now
there may be all sorts of aberrations or distortions of correct practices,
which would be deemed false or foul or unreasonable practices, and
they would be determined to be such in terms of either the standards
internal to the practices themselves or by being shown to be incompat-
ible with standards of a related practice or practices or both. It is impor-
tant to underline that practices are not isolated from each other, for its
neglect can lead to all sorts of confusion. That language games have
their own identity is important too – for if it were not for such an iden-
tity it would be meaningless to speak of relationships. But all the prac-
tices form part of ‘the stream of life’ – a complex, but indeterminate,
cultural whole. What we have, according to Wittgenstein, is ‘a compli-
cated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes
overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.’ (P.I., para 66)

Those preoccupied with religious matters, and theologians in particu-

lar, who had been condemned by the Logical Positivisits as confused
babblers, have felt emancipated as a result of the implications of
Wittgenstein’s new understanding of the conditions of intelligibility. It
is for this reason that one wants to say that no one in this century, no
one perhaps at any time, has done a greater service to the philosophy of
religion – for, it seems that, at no other time in the history of Western
philosophy, had religion been under such an acute attack as it was from
those professional practitioners of philosophy, earlier in this century,
who had condemned religious language as meaningless. And, by now,
over fifty years after those initial pernicious attacks on religion, it is often

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claimed that the philosophy of religion has undergone a renaissance, par-
ticularly in the English-speaking world. If this is true, as I believe it is, it is
in no small measure, a direct consequence of the new life breathed into it
by the implications of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.

This was an issue that I had wished Mulhall would have said more

about. But he may have taken all this for granted. Yet, the impression
I have from his paper is that Wittgenstein’s sole contribution to philoso-
phy is his method for clearing up conceptual confusion. This is a view
that is widely in vogue. Of course, it is an important part of Wittgen-
stein’s legacy, and the significance of this contribution is not to be
underestimated. It is also true that, in the final part of his paper, Mulhall
does refer to ‘the transformation and enrichment that Wittgenstein’s
grammatical reminders can engender’ – and he is even critical of Winch’s
attempt to impose limitations on this enrichment! Yet, in the paper
itself, there is very little development of what this enrichment might
mean in the realm of religion. In most of his essay, Mulhall is content
to underline the significance of the innovation that religious proposi-
tions are different from empirical propositions. But this is not to say
much. It is a negative thesis. It says nothing positive, for instance,
about the kind of language that religious language itself is. Not that we
find much of that in Wittgenstein either. However, by emphasizing the
indeterminacy of the logic of language, Wittgenstein was drawing our
attention to the richness and diversity of human experiences. Having
succeeded in casting off the straitjacket of a single, rigid but artificial
criterion of meaning, Wittgenstein allowed language to be itself in
all its diversity, richness and splendour. He wanted to show language as
it is and also the possibilities of language that enable us to see things in
a variety of new and different ways. Logical formalism with its rigidity
is banished and in its place we have diversity, fluidity, imagination and
creativity. It is in the opening up of these possibilities, in showing us
how human practices may be understood in different ways, that one
can claim that no one has contributed more in recent times, indirectly,
to the philosophy of religion.

Now let us turn to what appear to me to be some difficulties in

Wittgenstein’s thinking about religious matters. Not that I wish to
suggest that everything in this field that belongs to him is problematic.
But I have found certain aspects of the contents of the three lectures
on religious belief (as they are found in the LC) quite unacceptable.
Some of Wittgenstein’s remarks, in this specific context, appear both
strange and confused – this, again, often in stark contrast to many of

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the numerous ad hoc religious remarks found scattered elsewhere in his
writings. There are three basic points that I wish to make about these
LC lectures on religious belief. First, there are philosophical difficulties
here which are connected with the way Wittgenstein presents his case:
the disjunction between the religious and the empirical is overstated
and is far too rigid. Secondly, and this is a matter of some conjecture,
these difficulties may be related to problems which Wittgenstein might
have felt at that time (around 1938), and which arose directly from
his novel thinking on logic. And, finally, there seem to me to be insu-
perable difficulties with what may described as Wittgenstein’s ‘theol-
ogy’, as it is reflected in the examples given in the LC of religious
assertions.

Perhaps it is something of a surprise that someone who espouses
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy should find aspects of his thought in
the LC unacceptable. Why is this the case? Is not Mulhall perfectly
correct when he states that the whole of Wittgenstein’s enterprise in
the LC has to do with highlighting the differences between empirical
statements and religious statements? And is not this emphasis, on
showing differences, wholly in character with Wittgenstein’s thesis in
the Philosophical Investigations? It is readily conceded that the whole
burden of Wittgenstein’s later logic was ‘to show differences’ between
different ways of speaking, or of language uses. He wished to destroy
the kind of false unity that he has ascribed to language in the Tractatus
by making that unity formal – ‘the common or general form of propo-
sition’. But, as it has already been suggested, the point of referring to
different language games was to show that ‘saying something’ differs
from context to context, from one activity to another. But, in the LC,
at this comparatively early stage in the development of the later thesis,
there are dangers inherent in the way Wittgenstein presented his case,
and these may be partly responsible for much of the confusion that is
often seen in the writings of Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion,
and particularly the charge that their standpoint is fideistic.

What we are presented with in the LC is a dichotomy – between two

ways of speaking, between the empirical and the religious. It may be
asked, ‘Why only two?’ Is our speaking, our language, divided in such a
dichotomous way? Granting that it was Wittgenstein’s intention to
demonstrate the distinctiveness of a religious way of speaking, why did

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he ground it on a single comparison? And why did that comparison
have to be based on differences with empirical propositions? Would
not, and does not such a contrast immediately and inevitably remind
us of the Tractatus dualism? My impression is that the Tractatus casts a
heavy shadow on the LC. This may be discerned in the way Wittgenstein
proceeds to make the distinction between these two ways of speaking,
and especially by the kind of language that he uses to make and
describe the distinction. It is not that one questions the validity of the
distinction itself between the empirical and the religious, but the lan-
guage that is used echoes clearly earlier ideas. If one may adopt and
adapt one of Wittgenstein’s later analogies of language – that of a city
without a high road – what we have in the Tractatus was, not so much
a city, but a single throughfare. In the LC, we do have a city, but one
that does have a high road – and that is the thoroughfare we had in
the Tractatus. This high road in the LC is there variously alluded to,
and described, as ‘the normal’, ‘the ordinary everyday’, and ‘the rea-
sonable’. In the first of the three lectures alone, the terms ‘normal’,
‘ordinary everyday’ and ‘reasonable’ are used on numerous occasions,
and on each of these the purpose is to contrast such a way of speaking
with the religious way of speaking. I do not think for a moment that
the author of the Philosophical Investigations would have portrayed mat-
ters in this way. There clearly, language is portrayed as a city without a
high road. Naturally, if only two things are sharply contrasted with
each other, inevitably a dichotomy is created. But what is objectionable
in the LC is that the one side of the dichotomy is exclusively identified
with ‘the ordinary’, ‘the normal’ and ‘the reasonable’, and hence mark-
ing it distinctly as the high road. That cannot but be highly reminis-
cent of the Tractatus position – except, of course, that now the religious
way is accepted as intelligible. But merely by describing one way of
speaking as ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’, ‘everyday’ – even without identifying
the precise nature of that way – Wittgenstein has, perhaps unwittingly,
relegated all other ways of speaking to a suburban status in our lives.
In the Tractatus, religious discourse was altogether outside the world,
outside the city. In the LC, this way of talking is just somewhere within
the city’s periphery. Furthermore, by formulating the dichotomy in the
way he does, Wittgenstein creates the impression that what he refers to
as ‘the ordinary everyday’ way of speaking is a single or unified way of
speaking – and that it stands in stark contrast with the religious way of
speaking. It is an odd city indeed, with one major thoroughfare, and
one distant side road which at no point intersects with that thorough-
fare. How different this image is from that created in the Philosophical

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Investigations where there is insistence on both diversity of ways of
speaking and on their relatedness!

The manner then in which Wittgenstein makes and sustains his dis-

tinction between the empirical and the religious in the LC implies that,
from a certain standpoint called ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ and ‘reasonable’,
religious beliefs are to be thought of as being entirely outside these
categories. Prima facie, it would appear that the implication is that
such religious beliefs are abnormal, extra-ordinary and even unreason-
able. Indeed, he explicitly states of religious believers, ‘I would say, that
they are certainly not reasonable, that’s obvious.’ But then he proceeds
to remark, ‘ “Unreasonable” implies, with everyone, rebuke.’ And clearly,
Wittgenstein does not, for logical reasons, wish to describe religious
belief as ‘unreasonable’. But he does want to say that religious belief is
not within the realm of reason. In the Tractatus, religion is not in the
realm of the intelligible. In the LC religion is not in the realm of reason.

Again, there are strong reasons for believing that the Wittgenstein of

the Philosophical Investigations would not have expressed himself in this
way. Here, in the LC, he seems to adopt an essentialist conception of
‘reason’, which is synonymous with ‘the ordinary’ and ‘the usual’. Not
that his remarks appear thoroughly consistent in the LC. For, as Mulhall
points out, the distinction which Wittgenstein makes at one point
between ‘reasons’ and ‘normal reasons’ (LC, p. 56) suggests that there are
different kinds of reasons. Yet, what a strange distinction and dichotomy
again! Are reasons that are not ‘normal reason’ to be thought of as
abnormal? What would that mean? But the concession that there are
different kinds of reasons does at least reflect a position which is
slightly closer to that which we find in the Philosophical Investigations.
What he ought to have maintained here is that which he made clear in
his later writings – that there are multiple criteria of ‘reason’ or ‘ratio-
nality’. But, here in the LC he proceeds to say: ‘I want to say: they, (that
is, religious believers) don’t treat this as a matter of reasonability’ – a
remark which is patently false. This, it seems to me, reflects an essen-
tialist conception of rationality, which is completely incompatible with
Wittgenstein’s later thinking.

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein goes on to attempt to fortify his claim

by making the remark: ‘Anyone who reads the Epistles will find it
said: not only that it is not reasonable, but that it is folly’ (LC, p. 58).
Wittgenstein’s exegesis of the Biblical text is patently wrong. The mis-
take he first seems to make is connected with the logical point that I
wish to underline. In the text, to which I assume Wittgenstein is refer-
ring (1 Cor. 1), it is the religious unbeliever that calls the religious beliefs

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in question ‘foolishness’. But to those who believe in the Christian faith,
what they believe in – that is, redemption through the cross of Christ –
expresses the very wisdom of God. Of course, this wisdom is very
different from, and contrasts sharply with ‘the wisdom of the wise’ –
(although, it would be a massive error to understand this wisdom here
as something which is synonymous with ‘the empirical’. The issue is
essentially religious and concerns salvation. Is salvation through man’s
own wisdom or through divine grace?) But there is a huge gap between,
on the one hand, recognizing that there are different kinds of wisdom
or ‘reasonability’ and maintaining, on the other hand, that believers
don’t treat their beliefs ‘as a matter of reasonability’. Or that believers
‘don’t use reason here’ as Wittgenstein remarks. To extradite himself
from his confusion at this level all that he needed to say is what St Paul
himself was maintaining in this context, not that wisdom is one thing,
but that God’s wisdom is entirely different from ‘the wisdom of the
wise’. Indeed, had Wittgenstein followed strictly the apostle’s reason-
ing, then he would have been led to say something that is to some
degree more in agreement with his Philosophical Investigations’ view,
namely that these two forms of wisdom are wholly different from each
other. For not only is the logos of the cross foolishness to those who do
not believe, but it is also the case that God is said to pronounce the
‘wisdom of the wise’ to be ‘foolishness’.

Now is ‘the normal’, ‘the ordinary everyday’ therefore, to be deemed

to be outside this divine reasonableness? This question is merely indica-
tive of the absurdity of the strict dichotomous way that Wittgenstein
has presented his case. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s error is even deeper than
what has already been suggested. For the ‘wisdom of the wise’, in the
Scriptural context, is not contrasted at all, as Wittgenstein has wrongly
assumed, with a non-religious form of wisdom, but with a rival form of
religious wisdom. For if the ‘wisdom of the wise’ is at all at variance
with ‘divine wisdom’ both forms of wisdom are within the complex of
religious thought, and are essentially at odds with each other on the issue
of human salvation. In the relevant Scriptural text, both the Jews and the
Greeks seek salvation in one way or another. But the wise, we are told,
have failed in their efforts to know God through their wisdom – and
that, we are told, is as a result of divine wisdom. They have failed
therefore, in what is an essentially religious quest – that of salvation.
The whole text and its reasoning has nothing whatsoever to do with
anything like ‘empirical evidence’ or ‘verification’ and the connection
between such concepts and the logic of propositions. Wittgenstein has
completely misunderstood the text!

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My second point is this. I believe that some of the difficulties I find with
these lectures may be connected with the fact that what we have here
belongs to an intermediary period in the development of Wittgenstein’s
later philosophy. Wittgenstein was constantly reviewing, modifying and
developing his position, and the thinking reported in these lectures
does not reflect the implications for religion of Wittgenstein’s more
mature standpoint as we have it, say, in the Philosophical Investigations,
or in On Certainty. These lectures on religious belief were delivered in
1938. The Blue and Brown Books, which contain the earliest versions of
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, were notes of lectures delivered in the
academic years 1933/4 and 1934/5 respectively. The notes contained in
the Brown Book were revised in 1936. Yet, despite the fact that these two
books of notes are only separated by a short gap in time, there appear to
be, as Rush Rhees explains in the Preface to these books, substantial
modifications in Wittgenstein’s views – in the way Wittgenstein speaks
of language games, for instance. And there are differences again when
we come to the Philosophical Investigations itself. These differences are
not peripheral either, but belong to central notions in Wittgenstein’s
later thinking. They are connected with the whole question of the
nature of the unity of language and the interrelationships between vari-
ous ways of thinking – issues which also have a direct bearing on our
understanding of the logic of religious propositions.

This may help us to explain why Wittgenstein underlined in such a

rigid way the distinction between the empirical and the religious. Indeed,
the rigidity of his position suggests that although he had rejected the
formalism of the Tractatus he had embraced a new formalism – one that
allowed for diversity in terms of multifarious language games, but now
these forms of language have a rigidity of their own and are wholly
autonomous. There seems to be nothing whatsoever in common
between the empirical and the religious. Every way of speaking is dis-
tinct. Everything again, it seems, must be crystal clear! Logic demands
it! Again, I am suggesting that the Tractatus casts its shadow on the way
the dichotomy between the empirical and the religious is presented in
the LC. This is even more understandable also at this stage because
Wittgenstein at this time might still have been wrestling with difficul-
ties connected with his novel reasoning. For his new logic led
inevitably to the acceptance of realities other than simply the one real-
ity that is ‘pictured’ by the empirical sciences. Did not his new think-
ing, therefore, lead to the acceptance of the reality of God? And did this
mean that he had to embrace this reality? I suspect that Wittgenstein
must have been troubled by these questions. They might have appeared

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to him as rather unfortunate consequences of his novel view that the
criteria of intelligibility are internal to human practices. They certainly
presented a challenge. For religion, after all, is not a universally
embraced form of life – like, say, the language of talking about physical
objects, or the language of mathematics, or even moral language. All
these forms of discourse evidently have an unquestioned reality of
their own. But religion? It would seem that the most effective strategy
Wittgenstein could adopt, to extradite him from this logical dilemma,
would be precisely the one that we find in the LC – that is, the strategy
of underlining that religion is so different from the ‘ordinary’ or ‘the
reasonable’ that it is not a matter of reasonableness at all to embrace it.
On the contrary, religion is a matter of passionate belief without rea-
son. All this, I admit is a matter of conjecture on my part. But I am
looking for possible reasons why Wittgenstein created such an
unbridgeable gulf between the empirical and the religious.

It is no wonder that, partly as a result of the use by Wittgenstein of such

expressions as ‘they (religious believers) are not reasonable – meaning they
don’t use reason here’, Wittgensteinians have been labelled ‘fideists’. If
religious believers do not use reason, then they are fideists. They have
faith ‘without reason’ – and what kind of faith is that? Mulhall dis-
cusses this issue in the second part of his paper. I suspect that the pri-
mary reason why fideism has been condemned by most Christian
theologians is because they are rightly suspicious of emotion. And the
Scriptures, in one of the most famous parables in the New Testament,
that of the sower, warn against a faith that is based upon an emotional
response. Emotions, we are advised, are fleeting and cannot withstand
the trials and tribulations of life. As the strength of the emotion dimin-
ishes, so the faith disappears with it. Historically, of course, fideism has
been connected with the rejection of natural theology, and natural
theology has been seen as an external justification of religion through
‘the natural light of reason’ – whatever that means. If we base our
assessment of Wittgenstein’s position re these issues solely on the basis
of what we find in the LC, then, in my view, he is rightly accused of
being fideistic. However, in the light of the Philosophical Investigations,
this view has to be radically revised. For if ‘fideism’ simply means ‘faith
without reason’ then religion, like all other meaningful practices, has
its internal rules that determine what does, and what does not, make
sense. As Rhees once put it: ‘Theology is the grammar of religious
belief.’ Furthermore, as it has already been emphasized, Wittgenstein
in the Philosophical Investigations insisted that our ‘language-games’ are
related to each other – and it is because our practices are related to

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each other that they are intelligible in our lives. Religion is not an
exception and hence is not fideistic in terms of the Philosophical Investi-
gations criteria – if ‘fideism’ means ‘faith without reason’.

However, if fideism means ‘faith not based on reason’, Wittgenstein’s

position is more complex. For he argues that our language games are not
based on anything. Indeed, the whole meaning of the expression ‘the
natural light of reason’, on which, according to traditional natural theol-
ogy, faith is supposed to rest, becomes meaningless – for it implies that
there is some rationality that is independent of, or transcends the par-
ticular practices in our lives. But, again, our reasons are internal to the
activities: each ‘game’ has its own rules. This is the way we count.
These are our moral values. This is the way we speak about physical
objects. This is our religious faith. In each instance, in each ‘form of
life’ or activity, we use reason – or rather we reason in different ways.
What then becomes of natural theology? Does this mean that it is
necessarily meaningless? It is possible to understand the arguments of
natural theology in a different way – not as some proofs of faith based
on considerations external to the realm of faith, but rather as exercises
in the grammar of faith – and as bridges that may be used to attempt
to relate the language of faith to other forms of discourse. For instance,
without the theology of ‘revealed religion’, which contains references
to ‘the eternity of God’, that He is ‘from everlasting to everlasting’, the
Ontological argument would have no meaning at all. Similarly, if it
were not for the religious belief in the goodness of God as Creator,
both the Teleological and the Cosmological arguments would be reli-
giously worthless. For the idea of everything depending on some
impersonal Cause is a religiously futile idea. What the believer seeks is
not a causal explanation of existence, but rather the assurance that
existence is essentially good and, hence, meaningful. Natural theology
is not a matter of making inferences from the world, from outside
faith, to God, but rather it is an attempt to show how, from the stand-
point of faith, the world is perceived.

Thirdly, let us turn to Wittgenstein’s ‘theology’. There is something
profoundly wrong with Wittgenstein’s characterization of religious
beliefs in the LC. What we are presented with here are religious beliefs
as caricatures of empirical hypotheses and predictions. Again, the
influence of the Tractatus is undeniably evident. In the Tractatus, only
propositions which belong to the natural sciences have sense. In the

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LC, only the propositions which are supported by evidence are reason-
able. If you make predictions, say about the weather or about the
strength of the pound sterling in a year’s time, you may be asked to
justify your belief in terms of certain evidence. The predictions may be
said to be reasonable or unreasonable depending on the evidence or
weight of probability. And, evidently, if you make predictions without
reference to any evidence, that is clearly an example of irrationality.
Now, it is significant to note that almost every example provided by
Wittgenstein of a religious belief has a form which resembles a predic-
tion. They are supposed to be religious utterances but they have the
appearance of empirical predictions – with this crucial difference. They
appear to be without evidence and thus totally baseless. Hence, they
have the appearance to being wholly irrational. This is Wittgenstein’s
ground for saying that they are ‘not reasonable’. Now consider the fol-
lowing examples of ‘religious’ remarks made by Wittgenstein in this
context:

‘I shall think of you after my death, if that should be possible’.
‘Suppose someone believed in the Last Judgement.’
‘Suppose … another says, ‘No. Particles will join together in a thousand
years, and there will be a Resurrection of you.’
‘I believe that so and so will happen …’
‘What we call believing in a Judgement Day or not believing in a
Judgement Day …’
‘Suppose someone dreamt of the Last Judgement … and said to
me …’ ‘It will be in about 2000 years …’
‘Dead undergraduate speaks …’
‘He said that this was, in a way, proof of the immortality of the soul.’

‘Death’, ‘speaking after death’, ‘immortality of the soul’, ‘Last Judge-
ment’, ‘Judgement Day’, ‘Resurrection’ – these concepts reappear time
and time again in Wittgenstein’s remarks on religion in this context.
And this is profoundly misleading in two respects. First, these examples
are formulated in such a way, deliberately or out of sheer ignorance, to
appear as predictions. The references to ‘a thousand years’ and ‘2000
years’ reinforces this view. Yet, in a profound sense, such allusions to a
time-scale make them clearly pseudo-religious remarks – remarks which
one normally associates with weird and superstitious cults. Secondly,
they are given such, almost exclusive, prominence by Wittgenstein in
this context, that the impression is created that they are, is some sense,
typical of religious beliefs and central to the religion that is being

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characterized. But, they are certainly not concepts that are central in
Christian belief. On the contrary, religious believers that give such
prominence to eschatological ideas in their thinking are normally asso-
ciated with peripheral, heterodox sects or cults that seem to appear and
disappear as regularly as their false predictions! Wittgenstein’s preoccu-
pation with such examples is grossly unfortunate and betrays a sad
misunderstanding of the Christian faith. This is not the place to dis-
cuss the meaning of Christian eschatology, but it is at least meaningful
to ask whether or not these doctrines are, in any sense, connected with
time, or whether any eschatological beliefs are essentially concerned
with future events. There are some Christian theologians who advocate
a belief in ‘a realized eschatology’; that is, the Judgement Day is ever-
present. However, even if these examples given by Wittgenstein are to
be regarded as some kind of predictions, then they are religious predic-
tions made within a religious conceptual framework. This would make
them not unlike, say, an Old Testament prophet’s prediction that
Jerusalem would fall to an enemy attack. Such predictions were made,
not because the prophets had some paranormal view of the future, but
simply because they believed the words of the divine covenant. God
would visit his people for their sins. The ‘given’ here is a belief in a
divine covenant. It was believed that what happened to the nation was
wholly predictable – for its fate depended on its obedience or disobedi-
ence to the Law of the covenant. Such predictions, within that concep-
tual framework, were not at all unreasonable, but were expressions of
the prophets’ religious reasoning and faith.

Yet in the LC context, whatever these beliefs mean, they are said to

be unconnected with evidence. This, apparently, is partly what gives
them their religious character and gives them the appearance of being
outside the category of the ‘reasonable’. I do not believe that the
Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations would have ever main-
tained this argument, for, as it stands, it is again contaminated by a
form of essentialism. It is as if ‘evidence’ can only be one thing. But if
we speak of different language games and practices, we may also speak
of different kinds of evidence, and not only of evidence as we have it in
science, or in ‘everyday beliefs’ as referred to in the LC. Wittgenstein’s
whole argument militates against the language of the Christian Scrip-
tures, in which constant reference is made to ‘witnesses’ ‘testifying’ to
the truth of their claims. For instance, one of the central concepts in
the Fourth Gospel is that of ‘witnesses’ who ‘testify’ to the divinity of
Jesus. Again, this is not to identify the evidence of such witnesses with
what we call ‘empirical evidence’. That would be wholly mistaken. The

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conceptual framework of New Testament-time observers that made it
possible for them to ‘see’ God in Jesus is radically different from the
conceptual framework that enables us to forecast tomorrow’s weather
or to see that inflationary pressures within the economy will affect the
value of money in a year’s time. But that does not mean that the
concept of evidence is to be proscribed within religious language. That,
indeed, would be a piece of philosophical dogmatism!

It seems to me that an aspect of Wittgenstein’s error in this context is

to transgress one of his own more important lessons in the Philosophi-
cal Investigations – never to divorce assertions from their context. What-
ever is meant by the eschatological concepts he so frequently referred
to, they cannot be alienated from the central concepts of divinity as
they are understood within the Christian religion. The religious poverty
of the LC, as reflected in the examples of religious beliefs provided, is
startling. There is nothing at all here about those things which are
unequivocally definitive of the Christian religion, such as, divine
mercy, forgiveness, love and compassion. Wittgenstein’s version of
Christianity is one that is clothed in, what appears to be, absurd pre-
dictions. It is a travesty of the Christian faith.

If there are difficulties with Wittgenstein’s eschatological remarks

there are comparable difficulties also with his remarks about the role of
historical propositions. And, it appears to me, that this is crucial. The
interrelationships between various forms of life constitute an essential
condition of their intelligibility. The language games whose truths are
those most closely related to the Christian religion are morality and
history. Not that religious truth is identical with either of these, but
there is a close relationship between them. (Unfortunately, there is
very little about morality in the LC. Wittgenstein does suggest one con-
nection between religion and morality when he refers to the fact that
denying the existence of God is seen as ‘something bad’, and he proba-
bly would have also understood the notion of ‘divine judgement’ in
some moral sense.) But Wittgenstein does raise the issue of historical
truth, again in conjunction with the role of evidence in our thinking.
He admits that, even in religion, ‘we do talk of evidence, and do talk of
evidence by experience. We could even talk of historical events. It has
been said that Christianity rests on an historic basis.’ What follows
these remarks in the LC, and indeed, the way that Mulhall also deals
with these issues, appears to me to be fundamentally wrong both in
terms of logic and in religious terms. The issues have to do with the
relationship between the historical and the religious. Here, however,

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we need to restrict the sense of ‘religious’ to the Biblical religions – for
both the religions of the Old and New Testaments claim a certain
unique relationship with historical claims – a relationship which has
been widely either denied or misunderstood since the middle of the
last century. Certainly, Christianity makes the claim (and I believe this
is also true of Judaism), that it would be false if certain alleged histori-
cal events did not take place. (In Judaism this is connected with the
Exodus experience or deliverance of the Hebrew people from slavery in
Egypt. The identity of both the Jewish God and his people are bound
with this event.) In Christianity, the historical is connected with cer-
tain events in the life of Jesus and, in particular, the claim that he was
raised from the dead. ‘If Christ be not raised, then is our preaching
vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, we are found false witnesses of
God’ (A.V.1 Cor. 15). In other words, Christian truth and historical
truth are here so closely interwoven that the historical truth has become
at least one condition of the truth of the religious. There is nothing com-
parable to this in the LC. Instead, what we find are ambiguous com-
ments. Wittgenstein introduces a strange, unclear distinction between ‘a
belief in historic facts’ and ‘a belief in ordinary historic facts’. A distinc-
tion could not be more ambiguous. But let us suppose that he had in
mind, when referring to ‘a belief in historic fact’, something as extraor-
dinary as a claim that the historical Jesus was raised from the dead.
Then, Wittgenstein maintains, belief in this claim is very different
from a belief in an ‘ordinary historical fact’ – like, say, some facts about
Napoleon. Wittgenstein’s point seems to be that in the latter case, it
is, in principle, possible to express doubts about what happened to
Napoleon, while, even though what happened to Jesus is so extraordi-
nary, and so vastly remoter in time than what happened to Napoleon,
no doubts are ever entertained about those ‘historic facts’ that are at
the heart of Christian doctrines. Propositions about Jesus ‘are not
treated as historical, empirical, propositions’. There is a problem with
both the generality of this remark and also with its ambiguity. Its gen-
erality suggests either that nothing about Jesus is treated as either his-
torical or empirical – or that propositions about him are never thought
of in historical or empirical terms – or both, nothing and never. All
three generalizations are patently incorrect. The ambiguity of the claim
is connected with the related idea that the truth of both historical and
empirical propositions are contingent: and it is the case that when
assertions about Jesus are treated as religious or theological assertions,
as dogma, then what happened to Jesus is not treated as ‘historical,

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empirical, propositions’. Contingency is inadmissible within the con-
text of faith. Religiously speaking, what happened to Jesus, as God’s
will, could not be otherwise, while, on the other hand, what happened
to Napoleon is a contingent matter. The believer claims that there was
divine necessity in the life of Jesus which removes all contingency from
it. In a religious sense these propositions could not be untrue. But
propositions about Jesus are not always treated as dogma, and any reli-
gious necessity dogmatic propositions possess does not preclude the
possibility of asking the empirical, historical question: ‘What did actu-
ally happen to Jesus?’ – in which case we are engaged in an empirical
enquiry – and we may ask all sorts of questions about the historical
authenticity of the Gospel records, and so on. In one context therefore,
what happened to Jesus is absolutely indubitable, while in another
related context, that of an historical enquiry, what did actually happen
to Jesus is still open to empirical investigation.

Of course, it would be wrong to separate the propositions about the

Jesus of history from the fact that they are propositions which form part
of church dogma whose truth is guaranteed by a body that claims
infallibility. Or, if it is believed that it is not the church that is their guar-
antor, then the Scriptures themselves, believed to be God’s Word, guar-
antees their truth. Hence, in this religious tradition, the truths about
Jesus are guaranteed to be, in one way or another, incontrovertible by an
authority or authorities that claim to be absolute. Indeed, it is only after
the questioning of these traditional authorities of faith that doubts have
been raised about the historicity of Jesus. But the fact that such doubts
have been seen as an attack on the very basis of the Christian faith is
indicative of the significance of the role of the historical in Christianity.

I suspect that when Mulhall argues that if believers put so much trust

in historical truth they must be ‘ludicrously irrational as to strain
credibility’. He also seems to have forgotten that these truths are not
believed in vacuo, but are beliefs shared by a religious community – a
community that maintains that it has its origins in these alleged his-
torical events. In this context, both the concepts of ‘community’ and
‘continuity’ are important. And although such concepts may have
some role in secular history, they do not, in that context, have the
same role as they have in the religious context. Mulhall writes: ‘Reli-
gious believers base matters of great moment on evidence that seems
exceedingly flimsy by comparison with the corroboration they require
before accepting claims of far less significance for their lives.’ But this is
to exclude the central function of the role of the religious community
in the propagation of its truths – both its religious truths and those

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historical truths that are believed to be inextricably connected with the
religious truths. Mulhall’s remark would appear to carry more weight if
he were referring say, to the peoples of Ephesus or Corinth in the first
century

. Their conversion to a new faith appears more remarkable

as they were asked to believe in certain alleged facts that took place in
a distant land, a generation or so earlier, and without the weight of cen-
turies of belief in such historical truths. (But is it at all correct to
attempt to account for their religious conversions while omitting all ref-
erence to the central Reality of their faith? Is it not a religious doctrine
that eternal life is given as a gift by God – and that the mystery of divine
grace surrounds the whole process?) But, nowadays, most religious
believers are believers in a historical, resurrected Jesus because of their
upbringing. Within the religious context, these truths are regarded as
the ‘certainties’ of faith – ‘certainties’ that religious believers were prob-
ably taught before they had been introduced to, say, the certainties of
mathematics. If, however, the believer develops doubts about the valid-
ity of his faith and asks such questions as ‘Why do I continue to
believe these truths?’ the fact that he is surrounded by a cloud of living
witnesses, that he is part of a fellowship of saints, would appear to me
to be of inestimable significance for him. He is not an isolated believer
who possesses some private beliefs. By questioning his faith, he is ques-
tioning the faith of his fellow-believers – the faith, probably, of those
who mean most to him as persons. He belongs to a community of faith
that claims that it has its roots in history, and it authenticates its exis-
tence, in part, by demonstrating the continuity between itself and the
Jesus of history.

Let us finally turn to some of the remarks which Wittgenstein made
elsewhere in his writing, particularly those we find in Culture and Value.
I do not wish to comment at any length on what is in the Tractatus, for,
although such comments are often quoted by some Wittgensteinians
when it is convenient, the remarks cannot be reconciled with anything
that is Christian. ‘God does not reveal himself in the world.’ ‘The world’
here may refer to ‘everything that is the case’, to ‘the totality of facts’ –
expressions which have a special meaning within the Tractatus thesis, but
the import of these assertions is to place the reality of God outside intelli-
gible language. Hence, little of religious significance can be deduced from
the Tractatus. But elsewhere in Wittgenstein’s writings, particularly in
Culture and Value we have a variety of utterances that are deeply religious.

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In most of them, Wittgenstein rightly underlines the relationship
between religious belief and a person’s understanding of the kind of
life that she leads and the kind of character that she is. There is a deep
understanding here of the kind of experiences that can reinforce reli-
gious belief, or can even lead a person to religious faith. Wittgenstein is
correct to point out in the LC that it is often the case that ‘the word
“God” is amongst the earliest learnt – pictures and catechisms, etc.’
(p. 59) and this is partly the importance of the role of a religious tradi-
tion referred to above. But he also states that ‘Life can educate you to
“believing in God”’, (CV, p. 97e) that the religious unbeliever can
come to faith through certain ‘sufferings of various sorts’. ‘Life can
force this concept on us’ (ibid.) and Wittgenstein adds ‘So perhaps it is
like the concept of “object” ’ – by which I suppose he means that the
concept becomes unavoidable, the concept becomes a fundamental
part of a person’s seeing and understanding. God becomes ‘a certainty’.
When Wittgenstein characterizes such experiences he invariably thinks
of man becoming deeply aware of his limitations, his moral limitations
and also his inability to cope with life’s difficulties. Man can be beaten
by circumstances and may feel that he is being destroyed by them. He
can succumb to endless temptations which lead to a sense of hopeless-
ness and despair. In such contexts, a person who has no faith may come
to see that faith offers hope and acceptance and, through faith she may
see new possibilities, including the possibility of some form of renewal.
(Of course, it is also the case that the person who has faith may lose it
when faced with the vicissitudes of life. A tragedy may be felt so deeply
that the language of religious gratitude, of thanking God, has become
empty and meaningless for him or her.) In one of these contexts,
Wittgenstein explains why he is tempted to believe in the resurrection
of Jesus. It is, perhaps, the most orthodox of Christian remarks in his
whole writings – for here he does imply that salvation, in the Christian
sense, is related to a belief in a relationship with the resurrected Christ.
It is not just the case that Christians are followers of the Jesus of his-
tory who taught a certain moral code, but that they have faith, a trust,
in a person who sustains them in their weaknesses and fortifies them
through grace against temptation. It is a religiously wonderful passage
and it is astonishing to find it in Wittgenstein.

What inclines even me to believe in Christ’s Resurrection? I play as
it were with the thought. – If he did not rise from the dead, then he
is decomposed in the grave like every human being. He is dead
and decomposed. In that case he is a teacher, like any other & can no

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longer help: & once more we are orphaned & alone. And have to
make do with wisdom & speculation. It is as though we are in a hell,
where we can only dream & shut out of heaven, roofed in as it
were … (CV, p. 38e).

Wittgenstein goes on to refer to the soul and its passions and states,

Only love can believe the Resurrection. Or: it is love that believes the
Resurrection. One might say: redeeming love believes even in the
Resurrection; holds fast even to the Resurrection (CV, p. 39e).

The ideas and the language used here are reminiscent of Kierkegaard.
And it is important to note that this is one reason why it is correct to
claim that the meaning of ‘believing’, in the Christian context,
changes in the light of the fact that the believer believes, first and fore-
most, in a person – in the living Christ – and believing in a person is a
very different form of believing from, say, believing in any theory or in
any historical truths. To believe in a person is to say something about a
relationship with that person, and in the Christian context, this rela-
tionship is determined by its theology. Hence, the constant use of such
concepts as, ‘Lord’ and ‘Saviour’, ‘God’ which indicate that the believer
sees himself respectively as servant or slave of his Lord, as the one who
has, is, will have to be rescued from sin by his Saviour, and as one sees
his life in terms of submission to and the worship of God. It is within
relationship that religious passion is to be understood, for the relation-
ship is one of love, trust and dependence. But these passionate beliefs
are not unconnected with the belief in One who is not ‘dead and
decomposed’. So although Kierkegaard was perfectly correct to underline
the passionate character of religious faith, it was his error to deny that
one condition of this faith was a belief in the truth of certain historical
propositions – that Jesus is not ‘dead and decomposed’. ‘Thou wilt not
suffer thine holy one to see corruption.’ (Acts 2)

In the final part of his paper, Mulhall raises questions about the
human condition and develops an analogy, if not something more
than an analogy, between human sinfulness and the roots of philo-
sophical confusion. He does this in the context of Malcolm’s now
famous analysis of Wittgenstein’s claim that he could not help ‘seeing

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every problem from a religious point of view’, and Winch’s critical
response to Malcolm’s essay. Again, there is a great deal that is religiously
edifying in this third part of his paper. Like Mulhall, I very much
approve of Winch’s critique of Malcolm’s elucidation of Wittgenstein’s
comment – although, personally, I have no clear understanding at all
of what Wittgenstein meant by this confession. There is no difficulty
with the first part of Wittgenstein’s admission that he was ‘not a reli-
gious man’ and this I find is easy to accept. For I do not find much
in Wittgenstein’s writings that would tempt me to describe him as
‘religious’ – particularly if ‘religious’ means ‘Christian’. There is a super-
abundance of evidence, of course, that Wittgenstein had a passionate
concern for moral ideals and that he strove for some kind of moral per-
fection. But that is very different from being, say, a worshipper of God
or a man of prayer. A religious man, in the Christian sense, is a holy
man – a man of God, who believes and knows that ‘as many as are led
by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God (Romans, 8). Yet, there
are different forms and conceptions of spirituality and some of these
may encompass Wittgenstein’s religiosity. However, the problem with
that is that Malcolm’s four analogies between philosophy and faith are
based on possible parallels between Christian doctrines, as understood
by Malcolm, and Wittgenstein’s philosophy. I accept in toto Mulhall’s
approval of Winch’s criticisms of Malcolm. But then, towards the very
end of his essay, he proceeds to make the point that there may be more
to Malcolm’s third analogy than what Winch had appreciated. Here
I have failed to follow Mulhall’s argument. But, if I have not failed,
then Mulhall seems to me to be confused.

This third analogy, it will be recalled, was ‘between the religious atti-

tude of regarding oneself as radically imperfect or “sick”, and the idea
that philosophical puzzlement is a symptom of a “disease” of our
thinking’ (RPV, p. 110). Mulhall interprets Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘the
grammar or criteria of our ordinary words’ as constituting the ‘limits or
conditions of the human capacity to know, think or speak about the
world and the various things that are in it’. And the argument is devel-
oped as follows. We see these limits as limitations. ‘Limitations’ implies
imperfection and it is on this sense of imperfection that scepticism
thrives. This scepticism is analogous with our ‘inability or refusal to
acknowledge the fact that human knowledge … is necessarily condi-
tioned’. ‘The desire to speak outside language games is an inflection of
the human pride to be God.’ So it would seem to follow that conceptual
confusion is a sin – part of our degenerate nature, of ‘Original Sin’. And,
it is further argued that salvation from sin, in the religious context, is

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paralleled by salvation from conceptual confusion in a philosophical
context. We need a personal relationship with Christ to save us from
sin by his grace. We need a personal discourse with someone in philos-
ophy to deliver us from the ‘sin’ of conceptual confusion.

Although I approve every theological remark by Mulhall, I believe

that his religious enthusiasm has clouded his normal philosophical per-
spicuity at this point. Of course, from a religious point of view, any sort
of imperfection – physical, spiritual, moral and intellectual may be
understood in terms of man’s fallen nature and state. But it is equally
the case that in the same context, all human goodness and perfection
are seen as revealing the general grace of God. But part of the difficulty
of amalgamating such a perspective with philosophical considerations –
quite apart from establishing some identity between the religious and
the philosophical – is with the generality of the religious assertions.
One might argue, from a religious standpoint, that all crime is the
result of sin. But that belief does not in any way help us to understand
why certain crimes are connected with, say, social or economic condi-
tions. The general does not help us to understand the particular in this
context. And, it seems to me, that the religious perception of universal
human depravity does not help us to understand either the nature of
the distinction between sense and nonsense or what conceptual clarity
amounts to, or what are the roots of conceptual confusion. And I sus-
pect that Wittgenstein did not mean anything like what we have here
by his admission that he saw everything from a religious point or view.

I believe that in this context, Mulhall has, to some degree, misrepre-

sented some of the ideas found in the Philosophical Investigations. First
and foremost, he misconstrues the function of the notion of a ‘language-
game’. As I tried to make it plain in my introductory remarks, my own
conviction is that Wittgenstein introduced this notion in his work to
fulfil two specific functions only: first, to demonstrate the diversity and
complexity of the criteria of intelligibility – and thus to contrast this
view sharply with what he had said in the Tractatus about the single,
general condition of intelligibility, and, secondly, to underline the con-
nection between language and human practices or activities. In the
Philosophical Investigations, saying something does not always amount
to the same thing: there is a diversity of language games. And language
must never be separated from our doings, from human practices. Now it
may be correctly maintained, as Mulhall states, that these language
games ‘constitute the limits or conditions of the human capacity to
know, think or speak about the world’. Yet there are dangers here which
arise through the use of the concepts of ‘limits’ and ‘conditions’ – for

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there is a temptation to think of these, particularly in the way Mulhall
argues here, as boundaries that are strictly set, fixed and formal. And
such a view would bring us back to the idea of language games being
rigidly autonomous. But this is to overlook the fluid character of lan-
guage and practices – the fact that there is something fundamentally
indeterminate about our practices and lives. There is constant flux.
Constantly, there are new ways of saying and doing things. Furthermore,
what becomes of the point, emphasized by Wittgenstein, that practices
and saying things are closely interrelated? What I am suggesting is that
Mulhall misrepresents the character of the boundaries of language
games. Again, it seems to be the case that we are confronted with a
new formalism – whereas the thesis presented by Wittgenstein is one of
logical informality.

When anyone is conceptually confused one root of such a confusion

is that we have taken a concept out of its natural setting, out of its
grounding activity, without realizing it, and possibly, draw wrong
conclusions on this basis. (Incidentally, this happens to all and sundry,
and it is not only to ‘competent speakers’ who ‘suffer such a loss of
control when under pressure to philosophize’. It is difficult to reconcile
the specific nature of the circumstances indicated here with what
Mulhall has written just a few lines earlier about philosophical confu-
sion not being ‘restricted to inhabitants of certain disciplines’.) The
confusion, of course, is not in the taking of a word or concept out of its
natural habitat, but the failure to realize that when we are doing so,
we may be using the concept in an entirely new way, perhaps metaphor-
ically, or even misusing the word entirely, and consequently drawing
false inferences on that basis. Through extending the use of words we
can easily become confused. But I am at a loss to see how such a simple
common error ‘is an inflection of the prideful human craving to be
God’. We also make all sorts of other intellectual errors, like miscalcu-
lating when doing mathematics, or committing the fallacy of the undis-
tributed middle term in a piece of syllogistic reasoning. Are these also
aspects of our pride and depravity? Furthermore, if my language has
gone on holiday, it may suddenly occur to me that this is the case. I
may retrace my steps, and analyse my use of the relevant concepts, and
save myself from conceptual confusion – without the intervention of
either a friend or a philosopher. I will have saved myself. But in reli-
gious language, as Mulhall underlines, the self cannot save itself from
its egocentricity. Finally, not all my thinking, hopefully, is wholly con-
fused. But, religiously speaking, my depravity is total – and if, by
chance, I perform any good, that is the result of the intervention of the

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grace of God: ‘it is not I, but the grace of God that was given to me’.
Here there is no analogy between the occasional conceptual virus that
one’s thinking is susceptible to, and the religious condition of sickness
that leads, without the intervention of grace, to spiritual death.

Notes

1. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe, Blackwell,

1958.

2. Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology & Religious

Belief, ed. C Barrett, Blackwell, 1978.

3. L. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, Blackwell, 1975.
4. L. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G.H. von Wright, Revised Edition,

Blackwell, 1998.

5. N. Malcolm, Wittgenstein: a Religious Point of View, ed. P. Winch, Routledge,

1993.

6. All Biblical references are from the King James Authorized Version.

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144

Voices in Discussion

D.Z. Phillips

J: In the first part of what I had to say I concentrated on Wittgenstein’s
own comments on religion. In his Lectures on Religious Belief, he
contrasts religious beliefs with historical and empirical beliefs. He did
this in order to rebut misunderstandings. It is tempting to think that
you can investigate the existence of God as though it were a prior,
independent belief. Wittgenstein thought this was question-begging
because everything depends on what ‘existence’ means.

In the second part of my criticism I discuss Wittgensteinianism.

Here, in the presence of D Z. Phillips at Claremont, I felt I was bringing
coals to Newcastle. I addressed the accusation of fideism, and especially
the charge that Wittgensteinians claim that religion is immune to
criticism. It is impossible to sustain that charge, as Phillips has pointed
out. First, there are terms of criticism within religious traditions.
Second, there are religious responses to aspects of life that strike every-
one. Some of these responses may be superstitious and, hence, criticiz-
able. Third, Phillips makes use of common moral responses to criticize
certain treatments of the problem of evil. Fourth, although Phillips
does not press this, there is the kind of criticism that Nietzsche, Freud
and Marx made of religion. Certain forms of religion may indeed turn
out to be unhealthy masochism, economic exploitation, social and
political oppression, or dependence on a father figure. So possibilities
of criticism are not denied by Wittgensteinians. What is denied is that
the whole of religion could be shown to be meaningless.

The third part of my paper is the most controversial and I doubt

whether it would be acceptable to Phillips. I try to see what Wittgenstein
meant when he said that although he was not a religious man he could
not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view. This
remark is discussed by Norman Malcolm in Wittgenstein – a Religious

D.Z. Phillips

145

Point of View? And by Peter Winch in his Response in that work. I do
not think Malcolm’s analogies between philosophical concerns and
religious concerns work for the reasons Winch provides, but Winch
does not dismiss the issue of spiritual concern in this context. But I am
not altogether convinced of what he goes on to say. He says that lack
of clarity has important consequences for life, but distinguishes, some-
what artificially in my view, between ‘importance for the sense of life’
and ‘importance for the sense of one’s own life’. Take as an example
of the difference between first person and third person statements in
the philosophy of psychology. Conceptual confusion can lead to views
about private access; that there is something unique about one’s
experience that others can’t have access to. But is it not also possible to
live that confusion, to think that one is unique beyond the reach of
others? I think Winch’s distinction makes it look as though there are
difficulties which only belong to an exclusive class of people called
philosophers, as though others were not vulnerable to them.

But why do I think there is a genuinely religious aspect to this

philosophical concern? First, the confusion comes from the attempt
to speak outside all language games; to speak outside the conditions
of sense. This can be seen as a profound dissatisfaction with life, and
aspiration to transcend the human, an impulse to go beyond it.

Second, there is an interesting comparison between the philosopher

and his or her interlocutor, and Christ and the believer. I suggest that
there is a parallel between original sin and the role Cavell assigns to
scepticism – the issue of what is involved in the denials of scepticism.
Spiritual issues are involved in the denial of the human. One’s concerns
may be philosophical, but the motivation can be spiritual, just as, in
political theory, Rawls can advance a theory of justice, inspired by
neutrality, and still be moved by a passion for justice. So I am suggesting
that Wittgenstein’s combating confusion can have a spiritual aspect.

K: I am critical only of the third part of J’s paper. I don’t object to the
religious comments he makes there, but I do not see how he can link
them to a philosophical position.

When I read Wittgenstein’s Lectures and Conversations I was unhappy

from the outset. I listened with two ears: one philosophical, the other
trained by my religious upbringing. It seemed to me that his remarks
on religion are tied too closely to the Tractatus view of language. It is
unfortunate, therefore, if defenders of Wittgenstein use these very
remarks as a general account of his views on religion. I have in mind
the claim that God does not reveal himself in the world, and that the

mystical is not how the world is, but that it is. Rhees in Wittgenstein and
the Possibility of Discourse says that even in the Investigations Wittgen-
stein is still influenced by the analogy between language and a calculus.
If Rhees is right, there is an interaction between language games and
there is not the sharp distinction between the empirical and the spiri-
tual that we have in the Lectures and Conversations where the concepts
of ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ are simply given up to the empirical realm.
Truth and falsity belong to activities and thus when we pay attention to
divine activities we open up an entirely new field of enquiry.

The charge that Wittgensteinianism has no room for notions of

‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ is absurd. Here are just some examples.

First, Paul argued that circumcision was not necessary to be a mem-

ber of the Church. To think otherwise, he said, was an error. Paul said
that this was false doctrine. So this is doctrinal falsity.

Second, the Jews would condemn calling Jesus ‘Lord’ or ‘God’. To

them this is idolatry. That is another form of falsity.

Third, we have hypocrisy – another form of error.
Fourth, there is superstition. I had never flown before I came to this

conference. I took my New Testament with me on the plane. I found
myself wondering whether I was indulging in superstition, thinking
that the mere possession of the Testament would save me from harm.
So superstition is another kind of error.

Fifth, the Pharisees committed a terrible error. They were not hyp-

ocrites. They prayed sincerely, but what they said was, ‘We thank thee
that we are not as other men are’.

Sixth, to say that Jesus is not risen is false. Wittgenstein says that to

believe in the resurrection is to believe that Jesus did not decompose in
the grave like other teachers. The belief has an empirical element: god
did not suffer his holy one to see corruption.

These are simply some examples of uses of ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’, and

yet Wittgensteinians are said to deny the distinction.

J: The claim that a general distinction between the empirical and the
religious is too sweeping is important. I was less worried about that dis-
tinction, than with bringing out the religious and ethical significance
of notions like the Last Judgement which is lost if it is treated as a
merely empirical event. But I agree with K that before we say that an
event is this or that, we must look to contexts to see the sense in which
they might be taken together.

B: You spoke of ‘theistic metaphysics’. What do you mean by that? Is it
to be dismissed and not taken seriously?

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J: I didn’t make much use of that term. I did refer to Hyman’s tendency
to think that religious practices presuppose metaphysical beliefs.
I argued against that. But there is little doubt that in Wittgenstein,
‘metaphysics’ is a term of abuse. Metaphysics is an attempt to solve
problems that don’t need solving because they are the product of
conceptual confusion.

H: Isn’t that because, for Wittgenstein, what is real in religion is found
not in relation to reason, but in relation to Christ?

C: I think we have to be careful here. First, I would agree with K that at
the time of the Tractatus or the Lecture on Ethics for that matter, the reli-
gious expressions he wants to use are linked to the Tractatus view of
language. I agree that he is struggling to work his way out of that posi-
tion in the Lectures and Conversations without wholly succeeding. That
is why he can’t make sense of the expressions in the Tractatus and the
Lecture while thinking, nevertheless, that they are extremely important.
The importance of some of the remarks, therefore, survives the philo-
sophical position from which they were made. So I don’t agree with
K that they have little religious significance. For example, the view that
when one comes to believe in God, the world changes as a whole is
extremely important.

In response to B I’d say that there are times when Wittgenstein gives

the impression that he is the unconfused one, whereas the metaphysi-
cian is confused, as though he learnt nothing from the discussion of
metaphysical theses. True, he thinks these are confused, but this is
something which he comes to see through struggling with metaphysi-
cal voices in the Investigations which are voices within himself. In the
main he never dismissed metaphysical questions. He called them the
deepest worries in philosophy, albeit worries which we should strive to
overcome.

K: My main criticism is of the third part of J’s paper. I see no justification
for his analogy between scepticism and sin. The source of the former is
philosophical, whereas the latter comes from the want of a proper rela-
tionship with God. Coming to terms with scepticism doesn’t turn one’s
life around or bring salvation in the way in which receiving grace does.

J: I wasn’t so much equating them as suggesting that there is an issue
here to be addressed, both in relation to Christianity and Cavell’s
model of perfectionism. Cavell used the term ‘recognition’ and wanted
to explore what it or resistance to it involves.

D.Z. Phillips

147

C: But, then, what kind of recognition are we talking about? I think
the similarity comes from the fact that ‘the spiritual’ is wider than ‘the
religious’. Wittgenstein said that we must suffer in philosophy. There is
an analogy with moral problems here because there is a question of the
obstacle of the will involved – we will not give up certain ways of
thinking. But, having said that, what we are asked to recognize is wider
than what we appropriate personally. For example, compare St Francis
saying that the way flowers gave glory to God put him to shame, with
Spandrell in Huxley’s Point Counter Point slashing a field of flowers with
his stick saying, ‘Damn their insolence.’ What is it to see the world in
these ways? What sort of disagreement exists between them?

Philosophy itself is a spiritual determination to see the world as it is

in all its variety, but, for that very reason, it does not underwrite any
perspective. Cavell seems to want to advocate specific perspectives. I do
not think that he, or any other philosopher, can take that moral
weight on himself.

J: I agree with a great deal of that. I can see why you say that taking on
that moral weight cannot be part of a philosophical project. On the
other hand, I was thinking of how ethical and spiritual concerns enter
that philosophical discussion which is a love of wisdom. After all, in
some sense, you have to admit that you’ve been lost. Why does that
repeat itself again and again? Some conceptual confusions are very spe-
cific, but they may still express the impulse to violate criteria, to speak
outside language, and, therefore, to deny the human.

E: Aren’t you referring to human problems, not philosophical prob-
lems? Or are you saying that ‘the human’ includes ‘the philosophical’?

J: Well, having rejected Malcolm’s analogies, Winch does not deny
that philosophy can have a spiritual concern. He thought that
Wittgenstein’s investigations are suffused with it. So does a context
emerge where there is a connection between a conception of philosophy
and a conception of life? There is at least an issue here to be addressed.

S: I was puzzled why K said that belief in the Resurrection involved an
empirical element. Does he mean that you could settle the matter by
checking whether the tomb was empty? Suppose someone said that
Hitler had walked out of an empty tomb. So what? What religious
significance would it have?

P: I think we need to recognize that language games overlap in this
context. There is no sharp distinction between the empirical and the
spiritual.

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D.Z. Phillips

149

K: Exactly. The empirical is the condition of the spiritual. If Christ is
not risen, then, indeed, our faith is in vain.

A: If one is a religious believer one must ask what sort of person would
have brought about such an event, just as one asks what sort of person
would have committed a crime. If you say there can’t be any such thing
as a resurrection you’ll need a lot of evidence to show this. But if you
have a belief that it is probable that there is a God, then you must ask
whether it is reasonable and probable that he would do such a thing.

T: Wittgenstein says that religious believers walk a tightrope with
beliefs of this kind. If you over-emphasize some aspect you fall off, but
people do manage to walk the tightrope.

C: One way of falling off the tightrope is to say as K does that the
resurrection is the empirical condition of religious faith. That cannot
possibly be right because ‘resurrection’ is itself a religious notion.

K: But for you ‘raised’ simply means ‘exalted’. You believe the bones of
Jesus are somewhere in Palestine.

C: You referred to Wittgenstein endorsing your view. I don’t think he
does. I believe there is a change of direction in the passage you
referred. He says, at first, that he plays with the thought that to be
saved he needs Jesus not to have decomposed in the grave like any
other teacher. Now, I have no idea where the bones of Jesus are, but it
does not take love to believe that they are not in Palestine. And when
Wittgenstein turns away from the thought that he was playing with,
that is what he says – that it takes love to believe that the crucified one
has been raised on high, exalted to the right hand of God the Father.
Now if you think this invites the empirical question, ‘How high was he
raised?’ that is your problem. Are you going to ask the same empirical
question of the Ascension? These are religious terms and must be
understood as such.

F: Christianity is an historical religion – things happen at a certain
time. But it doesn’t follow that what happened is itself to be deter-
mined historically. The writers of the Gospels were not writing an his-
torical report, but proclaiming Good News. C is right, the Resurrection
is part of that Good News. It’s not as though a video camera could
have picked it up. They are not CNN reporters.

D: How do you know a video camera could not have picked it up?

F: That wasn’t my claim – it couldn’t.

E: K, you were referring to I Corinthians 15. There, for Paul, without a
doubt, resurrection and exaltation come to the same thing.

A: That’s a disputable view; we’d need to look at the texts.

K: It is certainly disputable. Paul refers unequivocally to the post-
resurrection appearances, on which the faith of the believers depends.

E: And he says that he is passing on what he, too, has received.

C: In other words, the sense in which Jesus appeared to him is the
same sense as that in which he appeared to others.

D: I think that if you ask most Christians whether they think that they
would deny it.

C: But what makes you think you can do philosophy in that way? If I
knocked on a door in Claremont and asked the lady of the house what
she meant by ‘thinking’, would I take her answer to settle the matter?
One cannot do philosophy by Gallup poll.

D: Why not? Wittgensteinians always claim to tell us what we really
mean. Why not ask Christians what they do mean? If the majority says
they mean such-and-such, that settles the matter. You can do this kind
of philosophy by Gallup poll.

C: No you can’t, because when reference is made to what people mean,
the reference is to the role the words play in their lives, not to the
account they would give if asked. Notoriously, in giving that account
our own words can lead us astray. That is why Wittgenstein said that
though a picture, including a religious picture, is in the foreground, its
actual application may be in the background. The matter can only be
resolved, if at all, through discussion with one’s interlocutor. It cannot
be settled by Gallup poll.

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Part IV

Postmodernism

Messianic Postmodernism

John D. Caputo

The word ‘postmodernism’ has come to mean many things. So before
addressing the principal objections that have been made against it,
particularly as regards its usefulness as a framework for a philosophy of
religion, we would do well to specify the sense in which we are using
this term. Very broadly conceived, I would argue that postmodernism
is a philosophy of ‘difference’, that it emphasizes the productive role of
difference, as opposed to the ‘modern’ or Enlightenment predilection
for universality, commonality, consensus, and what modernists (rather
presumptuously) call ‘rationality’. Speaking very broadly still, I would
say that, for our purposes here, there are (at least) two different vari-
eties of this philosophy of difference, depending on which of its two
nineteenth-century predecessors – Nietzsche or Kierkegaard – one
favours. These I will call, only slightly tongue in cheek, ‘Dionysian’
and ‘messianic’ postmodernism.

It is the thesis of the present essay that most of the objections that

are made against postmodernism have in mind the Dionysian version,
but that they fall wide of the mark of the messianic version, about
which the critics of postmodernism often seem badly informed. The
line of objections that are raised against postmodernists bear a family
resemblance: relativism, subjectivism, scepticism, anarchism, antinomi-
anism, anti-institutionalism, nihilism and despair. In my view, this line
of complaint takes its lead from the highly Nietzscheanized face of the
first version of postmodernism, but it does not come to grips with the
Kierkegaardian (and Levinasian) face of the second version. Clearly,
were all or most of these objections valid, postmodernism would not be
of much help to the philosophy of religion, or to anything else for that
matter, and it would be rightly denounced as inimical to God and reli-
gion. Although I will argue that when these complaints are legitimate,

153

they hold of its Dionysian version, I would insist that a more nuanced
understanding of this version also reveals very interesting possibilities
for religious reflection. The danger of the present ‘good cop/bad cop’
strategy is that it tends to sell the Nietzschean version short, to throw
it to the wolves of postmodernism’s critics, and to let it take a hit for
the rest of us. But be that as it may, this string of objections against
postmodernism is, as regards the second or messianic version, false
on its face and very likely betrays the critic’s unfamiliarity with its reli-
gious and even biblical provenance.

Dionysian postmodernism

The Nietzschean version of postmodernism has grabbed most of the
headlines and has dominated its popular reception. In this version of the
philosophy of difference (heteros), difference has the sense of diversitas,
the variety of forms. Here the emphasis is placed upon the affirmation of
multiplicity, a multiplication of forms, a polymorphic or ‘heteromorphic’
pluralism of many different kinds. This goes hand in hand with a love
of novelty, of the invention of as many new kinds as possible. Philo-
sophically, this view draws upon Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivalism’, that is,
his critique of ‘truth’ and the ‘ascetic ideal’. Nietzsche was critical of the
classical metaphysical ideal that there is a firm centre which holds, a
firm and immutable foundation or principle, to which all lovers of the
true or the good, of science or ethics, must rigorously (‘ascetically’)
hold – whether one takes that principle to be God, the laws of physics,
or even the laws of grammar. Indeed, when Nietzsche said that ‘God is
dead’, he meant this entire metaphysical order, any notion of an
absolute centre or foundation. That explains why he said we would not
be rid of belief in God until we had dispelled our belief in grammar,
our belief that what are for him the ‘fictions’ – or conventions – of
Indo-European grammar somehow give voice to the very order of
being (the grammatical subject arousing faith in the personal self, and
so forth). In the place of this absolutism, Nietzsche put his notion of
perspectives, that every belief, including the propositions of physics, is
an interpretation.

For Nietzsche, the perspectives issue from the play of forces asserting

themselves, each with greater or lesser strength, each expressing its
own immanent life force to a greater or lesser extent. Our own ‘beliefs’
are the perspectives we cognitive beings impose on things to promote
the flourishing of our own life, rather the way the trees in the forest
struggle for light. When Nietzsche complained, ‘if there were a God,

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what would there be left for us to create?’ he pressed the view that the
maximization of the invention of the perspectives required the disman-
tling of the idea of a summum bonum or primum ens in which every such
possibility would be already realized. For Nietzsche no belief or idea
enjoyed eternal or timeless validity; every such idea is invented – histor-
ically constituted – to promote the needs of life. Indeed, one is tempted
to argue that for Nietzsche such ideas are biologically constituted, so
long as one does not forget that biology too is another perspective and
ought not to be turned into another ascetic ideal, that is, a rigorous,
absolutely true, non-perspectival science to which everything can be
systematically reduced. Everything is surface, surface is what is deep;
the distinction between depth and surface, the true world and apparent,
being and appearing, comes undone. God is dead.

The most prominent ‘Nietzschean’ postmodernists are Gilles Deleuze

and Michel Foucault and nowadays, after their death, Jean Baudrillard,
who uses Nietzschean presuppositions in a ‘postmodern’ theory of
‘images’. Baudrillard represents a very important, more broadly ‘cultural’
dimension of postmodernism, one which forces us to distinguish it from
a more technical philosophical position called post-structuralism. In
Baudrillard, postmodernism is the articulation of the culture of the
world-wide web and ‘virtual reality’ upon which we have all entered,
where the distinction between image and reality, surface and depth,
dissolves. As his recent CD-Rom, The Réal: Las Vegas, NV, illustrates
very well, this is the ‘postmodern’ world that today interests radical
theologian Mark C. Taylor.

Feminist theologians like Sharon Welch

and Rebecca Chopp have made interesting use of Foucauldian inspired
‘genealogical’ analyses to criticize the historically constituted constella-
tions of power and sexuality that have been used to oppress women
and minorities, inside the church and without. In still another direc-
tion, Bataille had taken up Nietzsche’s notion of the overflowing of the
will to power to formulate a theory of an expenditure without return
as the essence of the religious act.

On the whole, this version of postmodernism has been greeted with

hostility by a wide variety of thinkers on both the left and the right, by
scientists and humanists alike. The right wing tends to think Nietzsche
is the devil himself, having utterly relativized, God-Motherhood-and-
Apple-Piety. But then again so does the ‘old’ (liberal, modernist) left,
which has no interest in religion at all, as witness physicist Alan Sokal,
who wants to restore the left to its pre-Nietzschean senses, has made a
reputation for himself denouncing the ‘cultural studies’ movement,
made up of postmodernists of the Dionysian stripe, who on his view

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155

are ill-informed charlatans attempting to relativize the results of mathe-
matical physics while knowing little mathematics and less physics. Even
Richard Rorty, who thinks that Nietzsche is good for use on weekends
when we are inventing our private selves, is highly critical of letting
Nietzsche into the workaday public sphere, with the confusion besetting
the new left, as he argues in his recent Achieving our Country.

Philoso-

phical theologians like Brian Ingraffia have roundly criticized Nietzsche
for having a defective understanding of Christianity and on this basis
have denounced any attempt to mix Christianity and postmodernism.

That is, I think, an overreaction, but it is an understandable reaction

that this version of postmodernist thinking tends to bring down upon
itself. At its best, Nietzscheanized postmodernism has opened up
important genealogical investigations into the historical constitution
of power clusters that can have emancipatory effects for the oppressed,
and have paved the way for the new or what Allan Bloom grumpily
called the ‘Nietzscheanized left’, a political result that would, needless
to say, have profoundly saddened Nietzsche himself who was deeply
antipathetic to modern democratic movements and who deeply regretted
the passing of the ancien régime in France. At its worst, postmodernists
often give us the impression that they have utterly jettisoned any stan-
dard of reason, intelligibility or argumentation; they give everyone the
distinct impression that ‘anything goes’ just because their texts are
written precisely as if anything does indeed go. They make themselves
easy targets for people like Sokal who have neither the time, the train-
ing, nor the taste for trying to decode and decipher the excesses of
their jargon. They write for an inside group of ‘po-mo’ academics, bolt-
ing from one conference on postmodernism to the next, presenting
the worst but most public face of this movement.

Messianic Postmodernism

But ‘postmodernism’ is capable of assuming a second and quite different
form, one whose nineteenth-century predecessor is not Nietzsche but
Kierkegaard. Here the notion of ‘difference’ takes on a significantly differ-
ent sense, where it means not diversitas, or heteromorphic diversity, but
rather alteritas, the alterity of the ‘other one’, that one ‘over there’. In the
second version, difference demands transcendence, the movement from
the ‘same’ to the ‘other’, a movement first announced in philosophy by
Plato, who said that the Good is epikeinas tes ousias, beyond being, at the
end of a steep ascent, and in religion by the transcendence of the Most

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High, the Holy One of Second Isaiah, Who said that His ways are not
our ways. Here difference means the One Who is ‘wholly other’ (tout
autre), to use the expression that Levinas borrows from Vladimir
Yankelévitch, who was writing about the One in Plotinus, although that
expression is also found in Kierkegaard.

By the wholly other these thinkers mean the ‘paradox’ – by which they

do not mean not some simple logical contradiction (x and ~x) – of a con-
cept of something inconceivable, a concept whose very meaning or con-
ceptual function is to indicate something beyond, something we cannot
conceive and comprehend, not just because of present limitations but
always and in principle. A classical example of this is the Anselmian God,
id quo major nequit cogitari, the concept of what we cannot conceive, of
something so surpassingly great that it is always and in principle better
than anything we can conceive. Such concepts have a principle of self-
surpassal built right into them. So, too, the Cartesian notion in the
Third Meditation of an idea of something of which I can have no idea,
an idea that has been implanted in me that I cannot understand, viz.,
of an infinite God. The ‘wholly other’ is always like that. It is not going
to turn out upon further investigation to be an instance of a type of
which I already have an idea, so that I am already schematically familiar
with it. It has an unreachability, an unattainability – an alterity – built
into it, like a shore for which I set out but never reach. I am in relation
with it, heading for it, but the ‘wholly other’ is also always withdrawing
from this relation, so that, in principle, I never get there. The paradox
is encapsulated nicely in Levinas’s phrase, ‘a relation in which the
terms absolve themselves from the relation, remain absolute within the
relation’,

or in Blanchot’s French quip, le pas au-delà, taking the ‘step

( pas) beyond’, which is also prohibited, the ‘no-beyond’ (le ’pas au-delà’),
the step not beyond, the step I am always taking but not quite making.
There is both a relation and a breakdown of the relation, like a desire
to have what cannot be had, or to know what cannot be known. So if
in the Dionysian version of postmodern difference, ‘infinite’ tended to
mean the unregulatable and uncontrollable play of differences spread-
ing across an infinite horizontal surface, ‘rhizomatically’, as Deleuze
would say (which means like crab grass), in this second version, infi-
nite difference has the sense of unreachable depths or heights, like the
Ancient of Days or the Most High in the Tanakh.

If the Dionysian version of difference takes the form of a certain

‘heteromorphism’, this second version, which I am calling ‘messianic’,
is best thought of as a certain ‘heteronomism’, where everything turns

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157

on the law of the other, on the disruption visited upon the ‘same’ by the
‘other’, which is the language Levinas uses, adapted from Plato’s Sophist
and Parmenides, to express a very biblical notion. In this version, what
matters is the ‘responsibility’ that I incur when the other overtakes me,
taking me by a kind of deep surprise, one that is older than I can say,
prefigured in the very structure of creatio ex nihilo, in which, in Levinas’s
beautiful phrase, the creature answers to a call that it never heard. The
heteronomic version is structured around the notion of a call in which
the other lays claim to me, has always and already laid claim to me. Its
model and prototype is no one less than father Abraham himself, who,
called forth from the land of his fathers never to go home again, and
called upon to sacrifice the seed of the very future he was promised
for this uprooting, could only say ‘hineni’, ‘me voici’, see me here,
here I am. In the Dionysian version of postmodernism, modernity’s
autonomous subject is dispersed and disseminated into a Dionysian plu-
rality of many selves, each one of which is historically, even grammati-
cally constituted. In the heteronomic version, the modern autonomous
subject is taken from behind, overtaken, by a call which it never heard,
by a command of which it is not the author, by a past that was never
present, and reduced – ‘led back’ – to a level of deeper subjection and
accusation, radically singularized by an inescapable, irrecusable responsi-
bility. The Cartesian ‘I’ of modernity becomes a biblical ‘me’, in the
accusative, accused by the call which claims it. ‘Abraham!’ ‘See me here!’

Thus far from being the nemesis of religion and ethical responsibility,

which is the complaint directed at its Dionysian cousin, the figures of
this postmodernism, where the term ‘postmodern’ marks a meditation
on ‘alterity’, are distinctly ethical, biblical and, as I will show, messianic.
Indeed, this discourse has been described by Derrida as ‘a non-dogmatic
doublet of dogma … a thinking that “repeats” the possibility of religion
without religion’. This ‘thinking’, Derrida says, is ‘developed without
reference to religion as institutional dogma,’ and concerns ‘the essence
of the religious that doesn’t amount to an article of faith’, representing
a body of ‘discourses that seek in our day to be religious … without
putting forth theses or theologems that would by their very structure
teach something corresponding to the dogmas of a given religion’.

Although Derrida is speaking of Kierkegaard and Levinas,

among

others, I have argued elsewhere and at some length that this ‘religion
without religion’ also befits Derrida himself, particularly as regards the
works that have appeared since 1980.

This claim is anathema both

to secularizing deconstructionists, who on the question of religion
repeat deeply modernist critiques of religion with perfect loyalty, and

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to religious thinkers, who, like Brian Ingraffia, mistakenly identify
deconstruction as a form of Dionysian rather than of messianic post-
modernism. But to the surprise and chagrin of many, Derrida, it turns
out, has religion, what he calls ‘my religion’, and it can be ignored only
at the cost of systematically misreading his work. Indeed, time and time
again the most outrageous and, one is tempted to say, the most irrespon-
sible misrepresentations of his work appear regularly in print, grotesque
distortions of a thinker whose principal interest these days lies in such
notions as the messianic, hospitality, friendship, testimony and forgive-
ness. That is due to the fact that in Derrida there are important veins of
both versions of postmodernisms, very roughly approximating his ear-
lier and later writings, and that too many commentators go by second-
hand accounts of the earlier work. Indeed, getting one’s reading of
Derrida right is a good case study in being able to identify these different
tendencies in postmodernism and the way they interact.

The principal document in which the religious, or as we shall shortly

see, the messianic element in Derrida’s work most clearly emerges is
his Circonfession, an autobiographical book woven together with
St Augustine’s Confessions, which appeared in 1990, on the dual occa-
sion of reaching his fiftieth year and of the death of his mother.

Here

Derrida recounts his upbringing as an Algerian Jew and a pied noir, as an
Arab/Jew who speaks ‘Christian Latin French’ in the land where Augus-
tine was born (he was raised on the rue Saint Augustin). Circonfession,
the confessions of a circumcised Augustine, a Jewish Augustine, is an
attempt, he says, to ‘leave nothing, if possible, in the dark of what
related me to Judaism, alliance broken in every respect’. Of this
alliance, ‘without continuity but without break’, he says ‘that’s what
my readers won’t have known about me’, ‘like my religion about
which nobody understands anything’, and the result is that he is ‘read
less and less well over almost twenty years’. Jacques is also the filius
istarum lacrymarum, whose mother Georgette/Monica, now dying on
the shores of the other side of the Mediterranean in Nice/Ostia, wept
and worried over whether Jacques still believed in God, never daring to
ask Jacques himself, ‘but she must have known that the constancy of
God in my life is called by other names’, even though he ‘rightly passes
for an atheist’ (JD, pp. 154–5).

Nothing better embodies and illustrates the convergence of religion

and postmodernism than the emergence of the ‘religion’ of Jacques
Derrida, his ‘religion without religion’, and nothing more effectively
lays to rest the misguided idea that religion is irrelevant to ‘deconstruc-
tion’ – the version of postmodernism I will focus on now – and that

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deconstruction is irrelevant to religious reflection. The central interest
of the debate about Derrida and religion up to now has been the ques-
tion of negative theology. It is certainly true that Derrida loves negative
theology, because it constitutes a paradoxical discourse organized
around a self-effacing name – the name of God – a name that is betrayed
as soon as it is uttered. Nothing pleases Derrida more than Meister
Eckhart’s beautiful and famous prayer, ‘I pray God to rid me of God.’
Derrida stands in loving awe of the resources of negative theology, of
its attempt to ‘go where you cannot go’, as the mystical poet Angelus
Silesius wrote. Negative theology is for him an ancient archive of the
deepest attempts that have been made to learn how to avoid speaking,
to speak without speaking, how not to speak. Comment ne pas parler?
But he differs fundamentally with negative theology, which he regards,
in one of its voices at least, as inevitably ‘hyperousiological’. However
much it protests that it does not know, negative theology always knows
in a certain way just what it does not know, and always manages to
affirm something all the more essentially by way of its negations. Nega-
tive theology, Derrida says, always knows where to direct its prayers.

Derrida is more interested in its ‘other’ voice, the darkest night of its

soul, when it truly does not know for what it prays and weeps. Quid
ergo amo cum deum meum amo?, St Augustine writes. Derrida says that
he has been asking this question all his life: what do I love when I love
my God? It is not a question of whether he loves God – who would be
so cold of heart to deny that? – but of what he loves when he loves his
God. He has, Derrida says, all his life long been ‘hoping sighing dream-
ing’ of something tout autre, something marvellous to come, something
‘undeconstructible’ which is the heart and soul, the prayers and tears,
the impulse and the point of deconstruction. Deconstruction, to the
consternation of its Nietzscheanizing, secularizing admirers, and to the
no lesser consternation of its conservative religious critics, turns out
to be a religion of the tout autre, a religious affirmation of what is to
come, hoping and sighing, dreaming and praying for the coming of
the wholly other.

But this religion is to be understood not in terms of negative theology

but in more Jewish, ‘messianic’ terms. The present preoccupation with
deconstruction and negative theology fails to see that deconstruction is
more prophetic than mystical, more preoccupied with messianic peace
and justice than mystical union, more Jewish than Christian-Platonic.
Deconstruction, Derrida says, is best conceived as the affirmation of
the undeconstructible, which he also describes as the affirmation of

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‘the impossible’. The impossible is to be distinguished from the ‘possi-
ble’, which means for him the ‘relatively’ other, what is no more than
a new move in an old game, the future that is foreseeable, plannable,
programmable. Deconstruction is the affirmation of the ‘wholly other’,
of a new game altogether, of an unforeseeable surprise, in virtue of
which the current order is kept in principle ‘open’ or ‘deconstructible’.
To the coming of this wholly other, we say ‘yes’, and ‘yes’ again, oui,
oui, since every yes demands a follow through which keeps its hands to
the plough, lest the resolve slacken or the repetition become rote.
Deconstruction says yes to ‘l’invention de l’autre’, where invention should
not be translated as ‘invention’, which would suggest the Dionysian
play of Nietzschean fictions, but rendered rather in messianic terms, as
the ‘in-coming of the other’, in keeping with its Latin roots, in-veniens.
In the military if someone shouts ‘incoming’, everyone heads for cover.
But, in messianic postmodernism to shout ‘incoming’ is to proclaim
the good news, which is why the proper response to the incoming, and
the first, last and constant prayer of deconstruction, is to shout, to
pray, ‘viens, oui, oui’.

According to an old rabbinical story that Derrida finds in Blanchot,

the Messiah never arrives. His very meaning is to be always, structurally
to come, à venir, so that if he ever showed up, ever actually appeared, he
would ruin everything.

The coming (venue) of the Messiah, Blanchot

said, must never be confused with his actual presence (présence).
Indeed, if one day he did show up incognito, we would ask him ‘When
will you come?’ The coming of the Messiah belongs to what Derrida
calls the ‘absolute’ future, the future which is structurally futural,
always to come, not the future present, the future that will roll around
into presence sooner or later. For if the Messiah ever came into the
present, history would close and we would have no more future, no
more hope. What would there be left to come? (to adapt Zarathustra’s
complaint). Even in Christianity, which from the point of view of the
rabbis is too impatient, where it is believed that the Messiah actually
did come, everyone now wants to know, ‘when will he come again?’
For it belongs to the very idea of the future, of hope, of history, that the
Messiah is still to come. Furthermore, and this is a point of great impor-
tance for Derrida, if the Messiah were actually to come, to become pre-
sent, a war would surely break out over what language he spoke, what
nation he visited, where his capital is to be installed, who is to be his
vicar and hold his keys, who is authorized to speak in his name, who is
authorized to say what he said and what he meant, or to translate it into

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other languages, and who has the power to exclude and excommunicate
those who disagree with the authorized interpretation of what he said.
(If the absolute truth ever arrived, who could be trusted with it?).

The affirmation of the in-coming of the wholly other, Derrida will

now say, is the affirmation of the ‘justice’ to come, where justice has the
sense not of a Greek universal but of the justice due to the ‘singular’
one, to the one whose every tear and every hair has been counted by
God, to the outcast, the outsider, the ‘widow, the orphan, and the
stranger’, to use the biblical figure that Levinas invokes. In deconstruc-
tion, the ‘kingdom of God’ would be a kingdom of nobodies, of what
Paul called ta me onta. The point of Derrida’s messianic is to hold the
present up against the white light of absolute future, of absolute justice,
which means the justice which is always to come, which prevents the
present order from closing over on itself and declaring itself just, or well
on the way to justice, in a perfidious asymptotic progress that tolerates
an intolerable amount of misery.

The affirmation of justice in decon-

struction is the affirmation of ‘hospitality’ to the other, of making the
other welcome. But to offer hospitality to the ‘wholly other’ is to
expose yourself to a ‘surprise’, to being overtaken by what you did not
see coming, to get more than you bargained for, since hospitality is not
supposed to be a bargain but a gift. The notion of hospitality puts a
stress on the idea of a ‘community’ which on one etymology means
com-munire, to build a defence (munire) around (com) oneself, to protect
oneself against the other. That is the very opposite of deconstruction
whose very idea is to make the other welcome, the wholly other, the
other whom I cannot circumscribe in advance by preconditions. But
how can one welcome the other ‘unconditionally’? Are we to open the
banquet to every passer-by? Whoever heard of such a thing? But then
again, how could one be conditionally hospitable, ‘welcoming’ only
those whom one has carefully chosen in advance and only subject to
certain conditions? That is not a true welcoming but a closing off, a pri-
vate list, a closed circle of invitees. Conditional hospitality is as incoher-
ent as conditional love, as loving someone but only up to a point, after
which we lose interest.

Thus, far from being a philosophy of despair, as its critics claim, this

form of postmodernism turns on messianic hope (viens). Far from being
nihilistic, it is deeply affirmative, oui, oui. Far from being relativistic and
capricious, it insists upon the uncircumventable responsibility of the
subject to the other. From reducing everything to subjectivistic play of
traces or signifiers, it is organized around alterity, indeed around the
wholly other.

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A problem

The largest sticking point, the main difficulty, which messianic post-
modernism poses to ‘the philosophy of religion’ has to do with Derrida’s
intractable suspicion of what he calls the ‘concrete messianisms’, the
historical religions of the Book, which on Derrida’s account have a his-
tory of violence built right into them. The power of the messianic on
Derrida’s accounting is precisely its indeterminacy, its structural empti-
ness, the resistance it puts up against the closure of the present or
prevailing order, that blocks off in advance any claims of exclusivity on
the part of any religion or of any determinate body of dogmatic claims
that may take itself to be the revealed word of God. As an Algerian
(Arab) Jew who speaks (Christian Latin) French, Derrida is deeply
impressed by the capacity of the religions of the Book to wage war on
one another, on the ability of the children of Abraham to slaughter one
another in the name of God. If his distinction between the concrete
messianisms and the formal messianic does not reduce to a distinction
between war and peace, that is at least an important part of its import.
The impossible, the justice to come, precludes in advance the claim of
any confession or any tradition to exclusive or definitive truth. One
needs to proceed with caution here. On the one hand, one needs to
avoid dismissive gestures that would ignore the powerful force for jus-
tice that stirs within the concrete messianisms, a force that nourished
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, and Dorothy Day and count-
less others, famous and unknown alike. On the other hand, such wit-
nessing strengthens faith, but it does not pass over into knowledge,
because people can witness with their lives and deaths to entirely
different things. In a deconstructive philosophy of religion, the con-
crete messianisms might be unique but never exclusive or definitive, each
longing and sighing in its own way for the tout autre, each praying and
weeping in its own way over the name of God. But none of them is
relieved of the need to ask, without having a secret answer up its
sleeve, quid ergo amo, cum deum meum amo?

Convergences

The line of thought that runs through this second, messianic version of
postmodernism converges with other approaches on at least two points.

(1) Postmodernism does not reject reason, as its critics charge, but
rather, like critical theory, postmodernism has redescribed ‘reason’ in

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intersubjective terms. Reason in postmodernism is not a subject–
object relationship enacted within the solitary, monological confines
of a ‘pure’ reason, whose very purity removes it from history, language
and the human community. Rather, like critical theory, ‘reason’ for
postmodernists is a relationship of speaking subject with speaking
subject and so reason has the sense of ‘reasoning together’. But by
rejecting the solitary ahistorical subject, postmodernism, unlike critical
theorists, go on to reject the transcendentalism of Habermas’s notion of
communicative rationality, the notion that intersubjective communi-
cation is guided from within by ahistorical laws of rationality, which
it regards as just so much ahistorical modernism or neo-Kantianism.
Furthermore, postmodernists regard consensus not as the goal of
communication, but simply as a temporary pause in the conversation.
Otherwise, the goal of communication would be silence. Were every-
one saying the same thing, there would be no reason to say anything.
The idea behind the multiplication of voices – the story of Babel – can
hardly be to speak una voce, for where there is one voice there is no
voice, where there is only one interpretation, no interpretation is
allowed. The idea of ‘reason’ that is astir in postmodernism turns on
the idea that the language of the wholly other is the language of the
wholly other, that the wholly other always offers a surprise. These words
come to me from the other shore; they are not my words, not some-
thing I already know in principle. The idea of reason in postmod-
ernism is deeply opposed to any version, direct or indirect, of Socratic
majeutics, but rather, like Kierkegaard, it turns on the model of the
teacher, the one who comes over me with something I do not know, so
that reason means learning how to welcome the wholly other, and rea-
son is a form of hospitality.

(2) The attempt to open up a post-secular discourse, to repeat or

reinstitute religion in a post-critical or post-modern way, to re-establish
the rights of religious discourse after modernist critiques have run
their course, is closely tied up with the notion of language games in
Wittgenstein. That claim is documentable in Derrida’s early interest
in Austin, which Searle utterly confounds, and it is quite explicit in
Lyotard, who makes extensive use of Wittgenstein in The Postmodern
Condition, Just Gaming, and The Differend. The point is plain. Religious
discourse is another and irreducible way to think and speak, religious
practices another, irreducible way to be. Postmodernism resists mightily
the hegemony of overarching discourses or metalanguages into which
other discourses are to be assimilated, reduced, or translated without
remainder. Postmodernists are committed to the irreducible plurality of

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discursive practices and rules, and they resist at every turn the notion
that there is a privileged access to the things themselves that is the
exclusive province of a particular discipline, natural language, tradition,
mystical experience, or religious faith, which is why in postmodernism
‘religious discourse’ itself refers to a plurality of language games, to
many different traditions, saying many different things. Postmodernists
think that there are many ways for things to be and many ways to
speak. The story of the tower of Babel is one of their favourite biblical
narratives, putting God, as it does, on the side of the deconstructors of
tall towers, monolingualism, and univocity.

In the end, to come back to my initial distinction between Dionysian

and messianic postmodernism, one would not get things right until
one could see the porousness of this distinction, the way these two
bleed into and communicate with each other, the way, if I may say so,
the postmodern religious sage would have to take the impudent form
of a Dionysian rabbi.

Notes

1. Mark C. Taylor and José Marquez, The Réal: Las Vegas, NV. A CD-ROM.

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

2. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.
3. Brian Ingraffia, Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1995). Contrary to his title, Ingraffia presents us with
a rigorous either/or: either postmodern theory or biblical theology, but no
mixing! His criticisms of Derrida make the standard mistake of assimilating
Derrida to Nietzschean postmodernism and missing Derrida’s ‘messianic’ side.

4. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh:

Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 64.

5. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1995), p. 49.

6. In these thinkers both premodern religious and postmodern themes are

made to intermingle in a fascinating way, an intermingling aptly captured by
the phrase ‘post-secular’. Post-secular thinking rejects the narrow, abstract
and ahistorical concept of rationality put forth by the Enlightenment, and in
particular the reductionistic tendencies of Enlightenment rationality. Totaliz-
ing, eliminationist, reductionistic critiques of religion, whether based upon
the universal sweep of physics (naturalism), economics (Marx), or the uncon-
scious (Freud), are just more tentacles of the Aufklärung trying to consume
everything on its plate.

7. At this point I am only adumbrating an argument developed in detail in

John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without

John D. Caputo

165

Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); for a correlative but
more introductory study to the later Derrida, which is where these religious
thematics are to be found, see Deconstruction in a Nutshell: a Conversation
with Jacques Derrida, edited with a commentary by John D. Caputo (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1997).

8. See Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey

Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 153–5. For a
lengthier commentary on Circonfession, see my Prayers and Tears of Jacques
Derrida, VI, ‘Confession’. To this postmodern interest in Augustine should
be added the work of the late Jean-François Lyotard, who at the time of his
death was writing a book about St Augustine’s Confessions, the work of the
English theologian John Milbank, and the recent publication in the Gesam-
tausgabe of Heidegger’s 1920–21 lectures on the Letters to the Thessalonians
and the Tenth Book of the Confessions, commentaries which lie at the heart
of the ‘genesis’ of Being and Time.

9. See Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, I, ‘The Apophatic’.

10. See Nutshell, pp. 24–5, 156–80.
11. That is the argument of Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994) against

the liberal euphoria of the new world order, invoking the spectre of Marx in
messianic terms that go back to Walter Benjamin.

12. See Levinas, Totality and Infinity, pp. 201–4, 216–19, 252.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

The Other without History and
Society – a Dialogue with Derrida

Anselm Kyongsuk Min

Let me begin by congratulating Professor Caputo for his very lucid pre-
sentation of postmodernism and its potential as a philosophy of religion.
I also want to thank him for writing two very helpful introductions and
commentaries on Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: a Conversation with
Jacques Derrida and The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without
Religion.

Prayers and Tears, especially, is a masterpiece of exposition,

analysis, and composition, which I would enthusiastically recommend to
all students of Derrida. So much of what he says in the paper presupposes
his much more elaborate and extensive analyses in these two works. My
dialogue will be primarily with Derrida and his works, and with Professor
Caputo in his two works as interpreter and defender of Derrida.

The spectre of Derrida has been haunting the western intellectual

world for some three decades now. His message has been getting across.
Totalities tend to totalize and oppress. Identities tend to exclude
and marginalize. Dogmas dogmatize, and systems produce closure.
Messianic claims spill blood. Fundamentalist claims to certainty and
definitiveness create hell on earth. Hence the need to subvert totalities,
disrupt the same, complicate simplicities, problematize the complacent,
contaminate the pure, and destabilize all systems and fundamentalisms,
by exposing them to the shock of alterity, the demand of the other, the
trauma of the unexpected. That is, to deconstruct. Deconstruction is
‘the delimitation of totalization in all its forms’,

the thought of ‘an

absolute heterogeneity that unsettles all the assurances of the same
within which we comfortably ensconce ourselves’.

In the area of religion Derrida’s deconstruction has been most chal-

lenging in his treatments of negative theology and the messianic, the
first showing what God should not be, the second what God should be
without being.

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Derrida’s deconstruction of negative theology

Derrida discerns two different voices in negative theology. The first
voice is hyperousiology. Even though negative theology denies the
possibility of attributing names to God and places God beyond all
names, it does not stop at negation but affirms God precisely in God’s
hyperessential reality. It is a higher, more refined modalization of
ontotheology, a variation on the metaphysics of presence.

For all its

negations, it claims deep down to ‘know’ what God is. The God of
negative theology, in fact, turns out to be ‘a transcendental signified,
the dream of being without différance, of being outside the text, outside
the general text, outside the play of traces’.

Negative theology feels as

secure in its possession of an object as positive theology; it is a triumph
of presence over representation.

There is, however, another voice in negative theology. As an irruption

from the depth, it expresses a yearning, a movement, a passion for the
wholly other of which we all dream and by which we feel addressed, a
deeply affirmative desire for ‘something always essentially other than
the prevailing regime of presence, something tout autre’.

It embodies a

passion for the impossible, a movement of transgression over and
beyond the present, a response to a primordial promise. It embodies
the spirit of relentless critical negation in pursuit of an ultimate that
always remains wholly other, a kind of a generalized apophatics, a
‘kenosis of discourse’.

Everything must pass through ‘the aporias of

negative theology’, and only a discourse ‘contaminated’ by negative
theology can be trusted.

What does deconstruction do for negative theology? Deconstruction

does not provide a secure foundation or a horizon for the intelligibility
of the content of negative theology. Instead, by reinscribing or resituat-
ing negative theology within the general movement of the trace, dif-
férance, and undecidability, within all the multiplicities and ambiguities
of language and history, the basic situation of all human experience
according to Derrida, deconstruction preserves faith as faith, as some-
thing ‘blind’, without the privilege of savoir, avoir, and voir, both accen-
tuating the passion of faith as faith struggles to take a leap and decide
for the impossible in the midst of the very undecidability that consti-
tutes its very structure, and maintaining faith as an indeterminate,
open-ended groping and hope in the wholly other. Différance precludes
the possibility of knowledge, vision, or face-to-face union with God, as
it always recontextualizes faith, exposing it to indefinite substitutions,
translations, and interpretations. Ontotheology takes faith as a mode

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of presence outside the movement of différance and the play of traces and
turns it into something secure, positive and closed, generating the perni-
cious dangers of absolutism and triumphalism inherent in all fundamen-
talisms and all ‘determinable’ faiths. ‘Closure spells trouble, … closure
spells exclusion, exclusiveness; closure spills blood, doctrinal, confes-
sional, theological, political, institutional blood, and eventually, it
never fails, real blood.’

Religion as messianic hope

For Derrida, religion is a response to the call and demand of the wholly
other, an invocation or prayer (‘come!’) for its advent, and the mes-
sianic praxis of justice here and now corresponding to that invocation
and demand.

The ‘object’ or ‘God’ of this religion remains the ‘wholly other’

resisting all reduction to a human concept, category or horizon. It lies
beyond all human imagination, credibility, graspability or deter-
minability, beyond all human logos, teleological, eschatological and
otherwise. In contrast to the God of ontotheology who remains ‘infi-
nitely and eternally the Same’

and in fact ‘the name of indifference

itself’,

the God of deconstruction is:

the name of the impossible, of novelty, of the coming of the Other,
of the tout autre, of what is coming with the shock of an absolute
surprise, with the trauma of absolute heterogeneity. Cast in a decon-
structive slant, God is not the possible but the impossible, not the
eternal but the futural.

There is no transcendental horizon within which God can be awaited,
expected, or made knowable; God shatters all human horizons.

Derrida is especially insistent that the wholly other is beyond all

determination or determinacy. A determinable future, with a deter-
minable telos, is a future that can be anticipated within the horizon of
a particular aim, of what is possible, and thus a future as present. Pres-
ence, possibility, determinacy: these are, for Derrida, one and the same.
The future of the wholly other is an ‘absolute’ future, a future absolved
from the regime and horizon of presence and identity, from whatever
is presentable, programmable, imaginable, foreseeable, beyond the tra-
ditional dualisms of essence and existence, universal and particular,
ideal and real. The wholly other is ‘structurally’ and therefore ‘always’
to come. It is precisely the function of the wholly other to shatter and

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169

shock the horizon of the same and foreseeable and open up the
promise and possibility of something wholly other. The wholly other is
identifiable with neither a determinable faith nor a determinable
messiah nor a determinable end of history nor a determinable degree
of justice. It is also to be distinguished from any utopian or Kantian
regulative ideal, which too has its own determinate content. The
wholly other is simply the beyond, the au-delà. It is impossible to
measure the extent to which the wholly other is being approximated
or realized in a society.

Religion addresses its prayer, its ‘come!’ to this wholly other in

response to the latter’s solicitation and demand.

To call upon God, to call God’s name, to pray and weep and have a
passion for God is to call for the tout autre, for something that
breaks up the hohum homogeneity of the same and all but knocks
us dead. The name of God is a name that calls for the other, that
calls from the other, the name that the other calls, that calls upon
us like Elijah at the door, and that calls for things new.

The invocation is a primordial affirmation based on faith and hope that
the impossible will be possible, the impossibility of a saving breach in
the chain of presence and totality, of a liberating breakthrough in the
oppressive horizon of the same, of the messianic emergence of the
novum beyond all human expectations and calculations.

Outside all human mastery and control viens hopes for a break
within the interstices of the laws of regularity, an outbreak of
chance within the crevices of the continuous flow of presence.

It ‘silently tears open lived time and ordinary language,’ ‘renders them
always already structurally open to what is coming’, and ‘prohibits
(pas!) closure while soliciting transcendence (le pas)’,

It is ‘the order,

or disorder, of messianic time, of venir and avenir, that disturbs the
order of presence’.

This messianic invocation of the wholly other

embodies ‘a certain structural wakefulness or openness to an impossi-
ble breach of the present, shattering the conditions of possibility, by
which we are presently circumscribed’.

For Derrida, tout autre est tout autre. The wholly other is every other.

The wholly other is not only God but also every human being. As Lev-
inas says, ‘infinite alterity’ or ‘absolute singularity’ belongs to both God
and human beings. For Derrida, this invalidates both the Kierkegaardian

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distinction between the ethical (the finite relationship to the finite)
and the religious (the infinite relationship to the infinite) and the
Levinasian distinction between ethics and religion.

Religion is not

separable from ethics nor, for that matter, from political and legal
matters. Wherever infinite alterity is at issue, there is religion. This is
why the hope in the wholly other is also a messianic hope for a ‘uni-
versal culture of singularities’

in which justice will be done to the

other in its irreducible singularity.

Messianic time interrupts the living present with the demand for

justice. Messianic time is prophetic time, the time of justice which is
always to come yet issues a call for justice here and now. Justice
deferred is justice denied. Deconstruction ‘is not meant to be a soft
sighing for the future, but a way of deciding now and being impas-
sioned in the moment’,

Différance:

does not mean only deferral, delay, and procrastination, but the
spacing out, the extension between memory and promise or a-venir,
which opens up the here-now in all of its urgency and absolute
singularity, in the imminence of the instant. The call of what is
coming calls for action now.

Justice does not tolerate present injustice in the name of a gradual
approximation of an ideal but demands justice here and now. It is
by definition ‘impatient, uncompromising, and unconditional. No dif-
férance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity
without here-now.’

The freedom of the wholly other from all determinate contents makes

Derrida’s religion ‘a messianism without religion, … even a messianic
without messianism’,

a faith without dogma, a religion without reli-

gion. It is a commitment to the wholly other in all its nominalist free-
dom and absolute heterogeneity without an equal commitment to the
determinate content of a particular religion, dogma, institution or
programme. Such a commitment to determinacy, for Derrida, entails
totalitarian reduction of the other to the same and generates violence
and war.

The ‘call for a fixed and identifiable other, foreseeable and

foregraspable … would release the manic aggression of a program, the
mania of an all-out rush for a future-present.’

Thus, deconstruction

‘keeps a safe distance from ever letting its faith be a faith in a determi-
nate thing or person, from ever contracting the tout autre within the
horizons of the same’.

The invocation for the coming of the other is

an apocalyptic prayer for the advent of messianic time, but it is an

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171

apocalypse without (determinate) vision, truth, or revelation, an apoc-
alypse without apocalypse.

This description of Derridean religion should also make clear the

minimal character of its content. The heart of that religion lies in its
messianicity or its prophetic passion for justice, ‘the infinite respect of
the singularity and infinite alterity of the other’.

This is where religion

and deconstruction converge. It is the very nature of messianicity,
however, to shatter all determinate horizons with their determinate
contents and thus to exclude all determinate, particular, historical
religions and messianisms. Derrida’s messianic hope and promise
always remain ‘absolutely undetermined’ and ‘eschatological’.

endorse a determinate religion is to spell closure and to spill blood. It is
important to purify the messianic of all determinate contents by epoche
and abstraction so as to intensify its urgency, but this also amounts to
‘desertification’ or rendering of religion into a dry and barren desert,
deprived of its specific comforts and intelligibilities and reduced to a
universal, formal structure with a minimal content, ‘the messianic in
general, as a thinking of the other and of the event to come’,

‘the

opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of
justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic
prefiguration’,

a primordial idea of justice and democracy to come –

to be distinguished from any of their current conceptions – as the
irreducible and undeconstructible ultimate. Religion is reduced to the
bare minimum of an atheological, open-ended, negative, or apophatic
process of justice, a movement toward a New International as ‘a
community without community’

or ‘the friendship of an alliance

without institution’.

Particular religions are nourished by their

‘place’, their history, tradition, nation, language and people, and gener-
ate the ‘politics of place and the wars over place’.

Derrida seeks to

liberate the messianic of universal justice from such politics and wars
by turning it into a desert, ‘a kind of placeless, displacing place – or
a place for the displaced’,

a postgeographical, universal religion, a

‘religion for all and everywhere’,

a Derridean equivalent of the Kantian

‘religion within the limits of reason alone’, although reason is never
without faith.

Living together with those who are different, especially with respect for
their difference, has always been a central problem of human history.
Individually and collectively, our instinct has been to subjugate them

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to our system of identity that makes no room for their difference, and
to reduce and violate them in their integrity as the other. This occurs at
all levels of human existence, individual and social, in all spheres of
society, economics, politics and culture, and with consequences in all
areas of philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and
philosophy of religion. What Emmanuel Levinas calls the ‘horror of
the other’

and its correlative, the terror of the same have been as

pervasive, as destructive, and as compelling as any original sin in
human history. The two global wars of the present century, the many
regional and local conflicts from the Korean War to Bosnia, the count-
less racist, ethnic and religious strifes from the Jewish holocaust to
South African apartheid and racism in the United States to the bloody
struggles between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, and the growing recog-
nition of the sexist violation of women throughout human history: all
of these have deepened our awareness, and intensified the urgency in
dealing with the problem of the other in our century. On the eve of the
twenty-first century most societies also increasingly face the problem
of living together under conditions of religious and cultural plurality.
Global capitalism has been bringing together different cultures
and making them interdependent, relativizing all cultural absolutes,
compelling all to become aware of the problem of the other, and
imposing the political imperative of dialogue.

Given these historical urgencies, it is no exaggeration to say that

today we cannot live without a heavy dose of what deconstruction
stands for, its critique of the terror of the same in all its forms, and its
vision of justice and democracy. All modern philosophies have been
critical of the given, from Descartes through Kant, Hegel and Marx
to pragmatism and critical theory. Deconstruction has few peers, how-
ever, in the single-mindedness of its attention to the problem of the
other, in its universalization of that problem, and in the radicality with
which it subverts all traditional ideologies from Plato to Heidegger. To
enter the world of deconstruction is to enter a world without absolute
principles, horizons, foundations, and centres from which to judge the
other, to reinscribe or resituate all our beliefs within the general move-
ment of différance that renders all identities heterogeneous and defers
all presences to the play of traces, and to live accordingly, without nos-
talgia for absolute certainties but also with respect for difference and
always with hope – in the case of messianic postmodernism – in the
coming of the absolutely other. Nothing can boast of pure identity,
nothing can insist on pure presence, all reality is marked by differenti-
ation and deferral. In an age that has suffered so much from the terror

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173

of the same, at a time when a pluralist sensibility is de rigueur for
survival and peace on earth, in a world where the ‘sacrifice of Isaac
continues every day’,

deconstruction should remain, even for those

of us who do not accept it, a thorn in our side, a perpetual reminder of
the dangers into which monocentrism can plunge the world, keeping
us in a state of ‘vigilant insomnia’ (Levinas)

for the cry of the other.

In this spirit, much of Derrida’s philosophy of religion deserves and

demands attentive and respectful meditation. His deconstruction of
negative theology and determinate religions, his description of the
messianic as the wholly other, his refusal to separate religion and poli-
tics, messianicity and justice: these are important antidotes against
the terror of the same lurking in religion, in its claim to closure, its
dogmatism, its fundamentalism, its totalitarianism. Left to themselves,
religions, including believing philosophers and theologians, delude
themselves into thinking that they ‘know’ who God is, with only
lip service to the classical thesis of the ‘incomprehensibility’ of
God. Augustine’s question, which is also Derrida’s, remains and should
remain compelling in its very challenge: What exactly is it that I love
when I love my God? In this regard, Caputo is quite right in locating
the specific contribution of deconstruction in providing for the reli-
gious believer ‘a saving apophatics, a certain salutary purgation of the
positivity of belief, which reminds us all that we do not know what
is coming, what is tout autre’.

A periodic ‘contamination’ of religion

with negative theology should be a wholesome exercise that would
also challenge each religion to transcend its determinacy and probe
its own messianic depth for the impossible possibility of the wholly
other.

What can we say about Derrida’s ‘religion without religion’? Derrida’s

religion is deliberately minimal in its content. It consists in an existen-
tial commitment to the impossible possibility of the absolutely other,
in a prayerful invocation for the advent of the wholly other beyond all
human reason, calculation and imagination, and in the praxis of jus-
tice in response to the call and demand of that other. It is a deliberate,
extreme abstraction from the content of all determinate and deter-
minable religions, their dogmas, rituals and institutions, and therefore
also an intellectual and emotional desert without the nourishing com-
forts of tradition and community. It places itself beyond the distinc-
tions of theism and atheism, religion and secularism, as different
therefore from the atheism of Enlightenment rationalism as it is from
traditional religious faith. One could say that it is the ‘logical’ expres-
sion of the faith of the modern Western intellectual who has been

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thoroughly alienated from all institutional religions as well as from all
traditional rationalities yet who cannot simply surrender themselves to
sheer, destructive nihilism and irresponsible relativism. Even in thor-
ough alienation and utter blindness one still hopes and gropes, beyond
all reason and faith, for the possibility of the impossible, for something
ultimate and undeconstructible, the advent of messianic justice, with-
out quite knowing what to call it. It is ‘a search without hope for
hope’, ‘in a space where the prophets are not far away’.

Derrida’s reli-

gion is perhaps the last refuge of the Western intellectual elite commit-
ted to both the protest of modern atheism and the Blochian spirit of
utopian hope.

I do not say this in disparagement. The cultural situation Derrida

depicts is not fictional. It is a situation that has been facing Western intel-
lectuals for some time and that is now increasingly facing intellectuals in
the rest of the world as well. It is no wonder that Christian theology has
likewise been trying to cope precisely with that situation in some of its
representatives such as Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner. It is quite relevant
here to mention Tillich’s deconstruction of traditional faith into
‘absolute faith’, which is not faith in a determinate object but a state of
being grasped by the power of being-itself, which in turn is neither
personal nor pantheistic but goes beyond both, which can only be
called ‘the God above God’.

Rahner’s increasingly negative reference

to God as ‘absolute’, ‘incomprehensible mystery’ and ‘absolute future’
is likewise an attempt to make Christianity credible in the present
intellectual climate, as is his minimalist, existential definition of the
Christian content as the commitment that ‘we are ineluctably engaged
by the incomprehensible mystery whom we call God, and who cease-
lessly and silently grasps us and challenges our hope and love even
when we show little concern for him in the practice of our lives or
even actually deny him in theory’.

This is also, however, precisely where the issue lies. Neither Tillich

nor Rahner goes on to propose, as does Derrida, an extreme abstraction
from the concrete content of determinate Christian faith. They may try
to criticize and sublate the determinate historical content of Christian
faith into something more credible and relevant through existential or
transcendental hermeneutic; it is not their intention to do away with
the essential mediation of faith by determinate historical contents and
produce a religion without religion, which Derrida does. Granted that
we cannot live without deconstruction today, as I believe we cannot,
granted that we have to reinscribe religion and politics within the
general movement of différance, can we live on deconstruction alone?

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175

I do not think we can. The very strength of deconstruction, the radical-
ity of its negations, may also be its very weakness.

Let me begin with Derrida’s depreciation of determinate religion.

Derrida has nothing but aversion for concrete, determinate religions
with their historical content. They are simply identified with reifica-
tion and closure and as so many sources of absolutism, triumphalism
and bloody conflicts. It is not that some determinate religions are
triumphalistic or that all determinate religions sometimes generate
triumphalism and absolutism; it is rather that the very idea of determi-
nation or determinability entails presence, identity, and the imperial-
ism of the same. Even though Derrida himself derives his concept of
the messianic from existing, determinate Jewish and Christian escha-
tologies by bending and repeating them ‘with a difference’, and even
though Caputo himself admits that Derrida’s own messianic religion
has all the marks of a determinate religion and can survive only with
the support of determinate, institutionalized messianic eschatologies,

still, determinate religions remain only ‘consummately dangerous’,

with no positive virtues to show. As a non-essentialist, Derrida may not
say, but he does imply, pace Caputo, that ‘theology or religion always
and essentially means bad news, the ancien regime, a reactionary, world-
negating, and fear-driven pathology’.

This means two things. On the one hand, the wholly other of messian-

icity cannot and should not become actual and concrete through incarna-
tion in a determinate religion. The only relation between messianicity
and determinate messianic religions is one of relentless negation, period.
The messianic is not what a determinate religion is. The messianic is
nowhere embodied because it is not in principle embodiable. It is not
only that the messianic always transcends any of its concretizing histori-
cal mediations but also that it should not be so mediated because such
mediation necessarily involves a fall, a corruption.

On the other hand, it also means that determinate historical religions

have no positive mediating function to provide precisely in the service
of the messianic, the wholly other in terms of nourishing faith and
praxis. As modes of frozen presence and identity, determinate religions
have no principle of self-transcendence, self-criticism, and self-reform
within themselves; there are no resources of a dialectic between the
present and the future, the determinate and the determining in histor-
ical religions. Between the wholly other and historical religions there is
no mediation, only radical otherness.

Derrida’s own religion without religion, therefore, can remain pure

and holy only because it is nowhere embodied or institutionalized in a

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determinate religion. It engages in the deconstruction of all determi-
nate religions from the transcendent height of pure, disembodied,
angelic ideality, just as Enlightenment rationalism has been engaging
in the critical dismissal of all religions from the self-legitimating height
of pure, uninstitutionalized, ahistorical reason. Instead of advising con-
crete religions, therefore, on how to bear better witness to the wholly
other under the conditions of history and necessary institutionaliza-
tion, it simply says no! indiscriminately to all determinate religions
regardless of their differences in the degree and kind of witnessing they
do. It is a yes! to the messianic but a no! to all historical attempts to
embody it. Derrida’s messianic reservation, like the Christian eschato-
logical proviso, is more interested in condemning religions for what in
any event they cannot do, that is, achieve a perfect realization of the
messianic on earth, than in empowering them to do what they can,
that is, bear a more effective witness to the messianic even if no
witnessing will ever measure up to the full demand of the messianic.
Derrida’s religion without religion remains an ahistorical abstraction.

The messianic wholly other impinges on our history, therefore, only in

the mode of interruption, disruption, discontinuity, surprise and opposi-
tion, and only in the experience of the impossible, unimaginable, unfore-
seeable and unprogrammable. What we can do by our own power and
with our own foresight and planning and what we experience within the
realm of the possible and the foreseeable, within what Derrida calls, with
sweeping generality, the horizon of the same: these have no messianic or
religious significance. That is to say, our moral and political actions in
history have no religious weight because we undertake most of them
with our own responsibility, with our own knowledge of what is possible
and what is not, and with our own freedom to risk the unknown but
always with caution and prudence. The ancient dualism of body and soul
returns in the guise of a new opposition of what is determinate and
what is indeterminate, what is possible and what is impossible, what is
foreseeable and what is unforeseeable. We encounter the God of decon-
struction only as a matter of ‘absolute surprise’.

What Derrida says about determinate religions also applies to deter-

minate political praxis. The messianic as such – the ‘universal culture
of singularities’– or justice and democracy are ‘structurally’ and there-
fore ‘always’ to come, and should not be identified with a determinate
present form of law or political structure. Although the perfection of the
messianic lies in the ‘absolute’ future, not in a future that can become
present, its demand is for justice ‘here and now’. The messianic
provides the light in which all present forms of justice and democracy,

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177

however perfect, will be judged and challenged to transcend them-
selves. Messianic politics lies in the hope for ‘an impossible breach of
the present, shattering the conditions of possibility by which we are
presently circumscribed’.

The messianic rhetoric of ‘shattering’, ‘new’, ‘unforeseeable’, and so

on creates the impression of a ‘radical’ politics as appropriate praxis for
the messianic hope that deconstruction constantly evokes. When it
comes to political praxis, however, it is anything but radical. Decon-
structive politics involves operating within the conventions and rules
of the prevailing order – there is no other place to operate – ‘bending’
and ‘repeating’ them ‘with a difference’, and ‘twisting free of the same,
altering it just enough to let a little alterity loose’, which is different
from ‘straightforward opposition, confrontational countering, which
succumbs to dialectical assimilation’.

Furthermore, we ‘can only

prepare for the incoming of the other, but we cannot invent it, cannot
effect it, bring it about, by a cunning deconstructive agency. We are
called upon, paradoxically, to prepare for the incalculable, to prepare
without calculating in advance’. The ‘only’ concern of deconstruction
is the time to come: ‘allowing the adventure or the event of the tout
autre to come’.

Deconstructive political praxis, then, comes down to ‘hoping’ for an

impossible breach of the present, ‘bending’ and ‘twisting free’ of the
present rules and conventions to ‘let a little alterity loose’, and thus
‘preparing’ for the coming of justice, which we cannot ‘calculate’ or
‘program’ or ‘control’. It is opposed to ‘confrontational countering’
because it would ‘succumb to dialectical assimilation’. At best, we have
a ‘politics of exodus, of the emigre’, ‘a subversion of fixed assumptions
and a privileging of disorder’, or ‘responsible anarchy’.

Just as decon-

struction reduces religion to a minimal content, so it reduces politics to
the passive minimum of hoping, bending a little, and waiting. There is
no substantive, systematic reflection on the dynamics and trends of
contemporary history, on the possibilities they contain for liberation
and oppression, on prospects for political mobilization for the libera-
tion of the oppressed and marginalized others that deconstruction
seems so much to care for, nor on political structures that mediate
between the messianic ideal always to come and present political
praxis that will concretize for a society and for a time at least the
demand of the messianic.

This is not accidental. Politics in the classical sense presupposes that

human beings can, collectively, as a community, acquire the knowl-
edge of their historical situation and mobilize themselves to produce a

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political structure that will best embody their (prevailing) ideals of
justice in that situation according to their knowledge. This is predicated
on faith and hope in the possibility of collective human action and col-
lective human wisdom. This faith and hope have sometimes been vindi-
cated by history, as witness the gradual, often uphill, but, by historical
standards, truly significant achievements in democratic institutions, as
they have also sometimes been contradicted by history, as witness the
many violations of human rights and the often incalculable suffering
brought about by totalitarian regimes. We do not, however, have much
choice here. It takes precisely collective action and collective wisdom to
combat the terror of totalitarian oppression, as history has also amply
demonstrated; the only alternative to the oppression by a totalitarian
regime is to set up a democratic regime. In any event, classical politics
presupposes this faith and hope in collective action and collective
wisdom.

It is precisely this faith that Derrida lacks, as is evident in his ‘histor-

ical and political’ investigation into the secret of responsibility in The
Gift of Death.

Derrida defines duty or responsibility as a relation

between a person in his or her ‘absolute singularity’ and the other in
his or her equally ‘absolute singularity’.

This ethical relationship,

however, immediately exposes me to the risk of absolute sacrifice
because I cannot at the same time respond to the call of all the other
others, an infinite number of them, who are also addressing an
absolute appeal to me in their respective ‘infinite singularities’. This is
the paradox, scandal and aporia of the concept of responsibility, which
reveals the concept at its limit and finitude.

‘As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look,
request, love, command, or call of the other, I know that I can respond
only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me to
also respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others.
I offer a gift of death, I betray, I don’t need to raise my knife over my
son on Mount Moriah for that. Day and night, at every instant, on all
the Mount Moriahs of this world, I am doing that, raising my knife
over what I love and must love, over those to whom I owe absolute
fidelity, incommensurably. Abraham is faithful to God only in his
absolute treachery, in the betrayal of his own and of the uniqueness of
each one of them, exemplified here in his only beloved son.’

Fulfilling an obligation to an other entails sacrificing and betraying
all other obligations to all the other others including those dying of

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179

starvation and sickness. Everyone is being sacrificed to everyone else in
‘this land of Moriah that is our habitat every second of everyday’.

The

aporia of responsibility is that there is no justification for sacrificing
all these others, the ‘ethical or political generality’.

Derrida asks,

‘How would you ever justify the fact that you sacrifice all the cats in
the world to the cat that you feed at home every morning for years,
whereas other cats die of hunger at every instant? Not to mention
other people?’

In this sense, then, the sacrifice of Isaac, a beloved

son, the infinite other to whom I owe an absolute duty, is ‘inscribed in
the structure of our existence’.

Likewise, behind the appearances of

normality and legitimacy, of moral discourse and good conscience,
society organizes and participates in the death and sickness of millions
of children through the very structure of its market, mechanisms of its
external debt, and other inequities. We allow the sacrifice of others in
order to avoid being sacrificed ourselves.

What, then, can one do about this ethical scandal? That Derrida pro-

vides no answer is perhaps indicative of the limits of his horizon. One
can say that he provides no answer because ‘this land of Moriah’ is ‘our
very habitat’, because such a scandal is ‘inscribed in the structure
of our existence’, about which, therefore, we cannot do anything.
His interest is in accentuating the aporia of moral experience and com-
plicating our moral simplicities, within the structural limits of our exis-
tence. Is such a sandal, however, really ‘inscribed in the structure of
our existence’? Or, does it point, rather, to the limits of Derrida’s own
deconstructionist horizon?

Derrida’s horizon, as that of his two mentors, Kierkegaard and

Levinas, is that of the individual in her ‘absolute’ and ‘infinite’ ‘singu-
larity’. As a moral agent each of us is ‘infinitely other in its absolute
singularity, inaccessible, solitary, transcendent, nonmanifest, originar-
ily nonpresent to my ego’.

From this perspective of the isolated

individual, Derrida goes on to ask, What can I do, precisely in my
absolute singularity and isolation, to avoid the suffering of millions of
starving children and millions of cats other than mine, since I cannot
respond ‘in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others’?

The

answer, of course, has to be ‘not much’. An individual as such cannot
respond to all these moral appeals in the same way at the same time,
nor does she have the resources to respond to many of them with any
adequacy even if she has the time to respond. The assumption, how-
ever, is false.

Modern history amply demonstrates that in situations where what is

at stake is the welfare of a large number of people serious enough to

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constitute the ‘public’ interest or common good, the appropriate agent
is not the isolated individual but the political community as such.
Whenever our serious welfare is at stake and we cannot attend to that
welfare as isolated individuals, we do so as united individuals, together,
that is, as a community. We cannot protect our security individually,
so we do so as a community by instituting the police and the military
as organs of the state. We cannot provide education for ourselves indi-
vidually, so we do so as a community by establishing public education.
We cannot guarantee minimum welfare for ourselves individually,
so we do so as a community by making sure that the economy is ade-
quately functioning through monetary, fiscal and other policies, by
establishing minimum wage laws, and by instituting social security
for old age and times of sickness. This common or collective care
for the common good is precisely what is meant by politics in the
classical sense. What we cannot do individually, we do together, that
is, politically.

If we change the horizon from that of the isolated individual to that

of the political community, from the lone ‘I’ to the ‘we’, and ask not,
‘What can I do as an individual?’ but rather, ‘What can we do together?’
the moral aporia that Derrida weeps over need not be as great or as
scandalous as he makes it out to be. We together, that is, various coun-
tries and private associations including the United Nations, have been
alleviating the suffering of millions of starving and sick children. I as
an individual do my part by paying my fair share of taxes and making
my fair share of contributions, which will both hire and enable other
individuals, that is, relief workers and government agents, to provide
the relief. If so many cats other than mine are suffering as to constitute
their relief a matter of the public interest, we can, through the govern-
ment, organize such relief by setting up shelters for cats, as many com-
munities are already doing. The fact that our existing political means
are not adequate to match outstanding needs is no argument against
the political solution; it is an argument for improving it.

This ‘political’ approach does not eliminate the moral aporia that so

concerns Derrida. In some sense, given the existential limitations of
the moral and material resources of humanity, such a moral aporia will
indeed always remain. Such an aporia, however, can be exaggerated
when it is approached only from the individual perspective, and
become ideologically pernicious when it is used as an argument for
political fatalism and neglect of available political means. It is critical
to remember how much humanity has achieved by working together,
collectively, that is, politically: elimination of hunger, illiteracy and

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181

many forms of epidemic in many parts of the world is, by historical
standards, an achievement too great and too noble to be merely humil-
iated by a misplaced messianic or eschatological proviso, although it
is not great enough and often too ideologically tainted to serve moral
complacency among us.

However, it is precisely this ‘political’ horizon with its faith and hope

in the possibility of collective action and collective wisdom that
Derrida lacks. Derrida’s emphasis on the ‘infinite singularity’ of the indi-
vidual and his deconstructionist distrust of totality, community and
unity for fear of ‘fusion’

do not provide confidence in the possibility

of ‘collective’ action: such an action is either too ridden with otherness
and division to be genuinely collective or too totalitarian to respect the
infinite alterity of the agents.

Derrida is more interested in unmask-

ing hidden oppressions in a totality than in encouraging wholesome
collective action. Likewise, his emphasis on the absolute transcendence
of the messianic and its radical discontinuity with any determinable
political structure or institution or law does not encourage mobiliza-
tion of collective wisdom in the interest of a determinate reform or rev-
olution as a historically appropriate institutionalization of messianic
justice. Instead, Derrida is more interested in condemning current
institutions for not being a perfect model of justice than in providing a
vision of better institutions that they can become or judicious reflec-
tions on the how of the justice that must indeed be done here and
now. As ‘infinite asymmetry of the relation to the other’, as ‘incalcula-
bility of the gift and singularity of the an-economic ex-position to
others’,

justice lies in principle ‘beyond’ all right, calculation, com-

merce, beyond ‘juridical-moral rules, norms, or representations, within
an inevitable totalizing horizon’.

In this sense, it is difficult to dis-

agree with Richard Bernstein when he accuses Derrida’s idea of a
‘democracy to come’ of being ‘an impotent, vague abstraction’, or with
Thomas McCarthy when he accuses Derrida of being more interested
in destabilizing universalist structures than in reconstructing protective
institutions for rights and dignity.

William James once spoke of two attitudes towards truth and error.

One attitude is that of the sceptic, who is driven by an obsessive fear of
falling into error and does not want to believe in anything except on
sufficient evidence. The other is the attitude of the pragmatist, who is
more driven by the hope of finding truth than by the fear of falling
into error and is therefore willing to risk even believing in error in
order to find truth.

Deconstruction is more like the sceptic than the

pragmatist. It is fundamentally fearful of all determinate embodiments

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of human sociality in history because of the terror of the same. It may
offer prayers and tears for the coming of the wholly other and its mes-
sianic justice, but it does not want to dirty its hands by working at
establishing determinate institutions of religion and politics. In the
name of différance it flees from the historical determinacy of matter,
body, senses, objectivity and sociality, the world of presence, identity
and totality, and takes refuge in the dream of the impossible. Perhaps
deconstruction should inscribe itself in the quite possible dialectic
of the determinable within history so as to keep its différance human,
not angelic. Please remember: in human history all negations are
determinate negations.

Notes

1. John D. Caputo (ed.), Deconstruction in a Nutshell: a Conversation with Jacques

Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), and John D. Caputo,
The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1997).

2. Prayers, 126.
3. Ibid., 5.
4. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 1982), 6; Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed.
Thomas Dutoit and trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, Jr. and Ian McLeod
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 68; Jacques Derrida, ‘How to
Avoid Speaking: Denials’, in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (eds), Derrida
and Negative Theology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 77–83.

5. Prayers, 11.
6. Ibid., 6–7, 10–11.
7. Ibid., 28.
8. On the Name, 50; Prayers, 27–8.
9. On the Name, 83 and 69.

10. Prayers, 6; also 11,12, 47–8, 57, 63.
11. Ibid., 113.
12. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974; corrected edition), 71.

13. Prayers, 113.
14. Ibid.,73–86, 118, 129.
15. Ibid., 113.
16. Ibid., 86.
17. Ibid., 86.
18. Ibid., 96.
19. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1995), 83–4.

20. Prayers, 155.
21. Ibid., 125.

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183

22. Ibid., 124; see also Jacques Derrida, The Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf

(New York: Routledge, 1994), 31.

23. Specters of Marx, 31.
24. Specters of Marx, 59; Gift of Death, 49; Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowl-

edge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone’, in
Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (eds), Religion (Stanford: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 17–18.

25. Prayers, 128.
26. Ibid., 99.
27. Ibid., 150.
28. Specters of Marx, 65.
29. Ibid.
30. Prayers, 128.
31. ‘Faith and Knowledge’, 17.
32. Prayers, 131.
33. Specters of Marx, 86.
34. Prayers, 154.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid., 155.
37. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘The Trace of the Other’, in Mark C. Taylor (ed.), Decon-

struction in Context: Literature and Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1986), 346.

38. The Gift of Death, 70.
39. Sean Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 28.
40. Prayers, 150.
41. Jacques Derrida, ‘Deconstruction and the Other’, in Richard Kearney

(ed.), Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers (Manchester, UK:
Manchester University Press, 1984), 119.

42. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952).
43. Karl Rahner, Prayers and Meditations (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), 35.
44. Caputo, Prayers, 128 and 150.
45. Ibid., 128.
46. Ibid., 148.
47. Ibid., 96.
48. Ibid., 75.
49. Ibid., 76.
50. Derrida, ‘Deconstruction and the Other’, 120.
51. The Gift of Death, 33.
52. Ibid., 68.
53. Ibid., 68.
54. Ibid., 69.
55. Ibid., 70.
56. Ibid., 71.
57. Ibid., 85.
58. Ibid., 86.
59. Ibid., 78.
60. Ibid., 68.

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61. For an elaboration of the concept and morality of collective action as

distinguished from those of individual action, see Anselm Kyongsuk Min,
Dialectic of Salvation: Issues in Theology of Liberation (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1989), 104–15.

62. On the Name, 46.
63. Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 13–14.
64. Specters of Marx, 22–3.
65. Ibid., 28; Deconstruction in a Nutshell, 17–18, 134–5.
66. Richard J. Bernstein, ‘An Allegory of Modernity/Postmodernity: Habermas

and Derrida’, in Gary B. Madison (ed.), Working through Derrida (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1993), 227; Thomas McCarthy, ‘The Politics
of the Ineffable: Derrida’s Deconstructionism’, The Philosophical Forum 21:
1–2 (Fall–Winter, 1989–90), 146–68.

67. William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

(New York: Dover Publications, 1956; originally published by Longmans,
Green & Co., 1897), 17–19.

68. For my similar critique of Emmanuel Levinas, see my ‘Toward a Dialectic

of Totality and Infinity: Reflections on Emmanuel Levinas’, The Journal of
Religion 78:4 (October 1998), 571–92.

Anselm Kyongsuk Min

185

186

Voices in Discussion

D.Z. Phillips

F: Derrida is well received by theologians, but among philosophers he
is not so fortunate. Perhaps this is because he attacks eighteenth-
century rational theology, an attack which extends into a criticism of
Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics. He talks in terms of postmodern
Heideggerian reflections, and his work has been influenced by Levinas.
His work can be related, with profit, to that of J.-L. Marion.

What are the main objections to his views? It is better to leave the

term postmodern to itself, since it is used so loosely now. It is better to
talk of post-structuralism. In this the philosophy of difference is the
main heuristic device. It falls under two denominations. One empha-
sizes polymorphic plurality and goes back to Nietzsche. The other goes
back to Kierkegaard and is influenced by Levinas who is anything but
postmodern. Levinas is a conservative, Jewish Rabbinical scholar.

For Nietzsche we are confronted by the innocent play of forces, both

noble and ignoble. This is the play of necessity for which no one is
responsible. Nazis are like waves which crash on the shore and break
houses down. Some try to democratize this on the Nietzschean left.

Nietzsche shows us what we do not want Christianity to be. Here we

can be self-destructive with the notion of guilt. Much of the abuse is
aimed at this tradition.

The other tradition goes back to Kierkegaard and emphasizes God as

the wholly other to which we are subject as the measure of truth.
Levinas introduced the prophets to Paris of all places, where so many
exotic philosophical plants grow. If the Bible makes sense it should make
philosophical sense, and so Levinas uses Plato to emphasize the ethical
relation to the neighbour. He says that the face of the other is the trace
God leaves of himself as he withdraws from the world. Philosophers
took notice of these Biblical categories, among them Derrida. He is

D.Z. Phillips

187

seriously interested in Levinas in his emphasis on justice, the gift
(grace) and hospitality, the most venerable of the Nomadic virtues.
This year he is to give a series of lectures on forgiveness. He is inter-
ested in matters that can be put to work. He is not interested in the
philosophy of religion.

I: I have no quarrel with F’s interpretation of Derrida, so I will go
straight to my criticisms.

First, ‘living with the other’ is central in Derrida’s work. It is a prob-

lem which is likely to increase in our global world. No one has raised
this problem so intensely as Derrida. Levinas stressed that a concern
with the other cannot be reduced to self-interest. For Derrida the other
has a self-negating transcendence, and so purifies us of dogmatism and
cultural particularity. So he seeks a ‘religion without religion’. Religions
are criticized for not living up to this ideal. Derrida tends to ignore
possibilities for self-transformation within specific faiths. Instead, he
criticizes them for what they cannot be. He doesn’t tell us how to
improve them. Derrida’s speculations are beyond positive law and pos-
itive rights. So he has been accused of impotent deliberations. These
problems are not resolved in The Politics of Friendship because he has a
fear of community, hence his emphasis on difference. The social is
always seen as an oppressive, exclusive singularity. Derrida cannot have
a theory of political action.

How do I relate Derrida to liberation theology? In this latter context

I emphasize the infinite dignity of the individual, as in the classical
tradition. By ‘totality’ I mean any system of identity. It may or may not
be oppressive depending on the attention it gives to infinity. Finally,
I emphasize ‘solidarity’, the mutual response to our dependence on
each other. But without totality, informed by infinity, this becomes an
empty ideal.

I distinguish between the sceptic who, because of the fear of error,

denies truth, and the pragmatist who will risk error for the sake of
truth. Derrida is more like the sceptic. He flees from our difficulties and
takes refuge in a dream of the impossible. Difference is not human, but
angelic.

F: I liked your paper up to a point; that point was when you began
criticizing me! I don’t recognize Derrida in your criticisms. He does not
have a dream of the impossible. On the contrary, he insists that specu-
lation should begin from where we are. The singularity he emphasizes
is not that of the self, but of the other. He is seriously concerned with
justice, but it is not a goal which can be specified once and for all and

then sought after. It is a never-ending ideal. He is not condemning par-
ticular institutions, but he is critical of crude solutions and anxious to
see that they are not thought to be the ideal. Our institutions are for-
ever answerable to an unending ideal.

C: I want to compare Derrida’s emphasis on difference with Wittgenstein’s
promise to teach us differences. Michael Weston in his Kierkegaard and
Continental Philosophy argues that Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida,
although avowedly anti-metaphysical, cannot resist the temptation to
put some general attitude in its place. This something is sublimed above
the differences. Do you think that is a just accusation?

F: Decision in Derrida is neither wanton nor pointless. The ‘sublime’ is
welcomed since it is what we are not. The new age is not here. We
must always respond critically to the present.

J: Isn’t there a difference in the later Derrida? In his early work he
responds to specific texts and destabilizes them. But now comes a con-
cern with justice. Why justice? Justice presupposes particular institutions,
whereas his general position only supports destabilization.

F: I don’t think the early texts are wanton, but he did not think they
could be made objective by closed rules.

J: Which is why he thought Searle was so awry.

F: Exactly. How many ways can a text be opened up? He finds as many
as he can. But the expectation of a new way saves it from being played
around.

G: But hasn’t an act of subversion taken place in The Gift of Death?
I feed my cat while thousands of other cats are starving. So it is with
humans. So I cannot fulfil my obligation at all if I start with one. I also
make the other dependent on me.

F: The late writings are often said to be open to this objection. But
Derrida wants to describe a self-limiting set. What we want from a gift
makes it impossible. What I actually do is to produce a debt of grati-
tude in the recipient, and a feeling of generosity in myself. But his
argument is not: therefore no gift, but a recognition that this is the
human situation, a self-limiting set. Derrida is telling us to understand
this and then act – understanding our limitations. If we ignore the
logic of the gift it has an unfortunate effect on us. Know what it is to
give; know the inherent difficulty in a gift. The limitation is structural,
not personal.

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G: But as long as there are cats I can’t feed, guilt is built in, structurally,
to my act.

F: But I must act.

G: I doubt that is his view.

F: I don’t accept that.

D: Are you saying that these insights into our limitations are better
achieved by his philosophy than any other kind of philosophy, say,
Process Thought or analytic philosophy?

F: No, I didn’t mean to. But Derrida does attack the notion of the
autonomous subject in philosophy which you find from Descartes,
through Kant to Husserl. In Levinas we are called forth by the law, but
this is not equated with reason as it is in Kant.

B: But responding to the other is not independent of rules, is it?; rules
that can be extended in various ways to meet new situations?

F: Derrida has broken with the Heideggerian conception of language.
He wants to say that we must go beyond rules in recognizing that the
other may surprise you. You have to listen to something you didn’t see
coming. The other knows something you don’t. So the Messiah cannot
turn up, for then there would be no more surprises. Derrida is always
open to a new game.

B: Is what is to be accepted as a new game entirely up to me?

F: No, it depends on the conditions of discourse.

B: That sounds like Rorty.

F: No, I do not find Derrida’s seriousness in Rorty.

O: Why should my relation to the other be ethical? What about sexual
relations?

F: Derrida is more political than ethical. We’d have to look at the
details of particular cases. Unjust laws are answerable to the demands
of hospitality.

E: Aren’t the terms of the equation in Derrida too simplistic? On the
one hand, you have certain demands which belong to specific religious
traditions. On the other hand, you have his emphasis on ‘religion
without religion’. How are these to be combined? There seems to be an
unresolvable tension between them.

D.Z. Phillips

189

F: There is no reason why one shouldn’t consider the relation between
these emphases in specific contexts. He is not talking of an abstract
impossibility. The difficulty of the other is always in the present. We
must begin where we are. Derrida detests the late twentieth-century
view of democracy, as though the answer has arrived. What he wants
us to do is to view any situation in a critical tension between what we
are and what we are not.

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Part V

Critical Theory

Critical Theory and Religion

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann

The ‘Critical Theory’ of the Frankfurt School was conceived in particular
by its founders Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, as an ‘open
project’: that is, more a philosophically funded search for a theory of
society than a unified doctrine or teaching. It is not therefore surprising
that the positions taken by critical theorists on the question of religion
differ significantly from one another in their details.

In my paper, therefore, I wish to examine a few selected texts by pro-

ponents of the ‘Critical Theory’. I shall first discuss the critical impulse
of the philosophy of Max Horkheimer from his early period in the
1930s (1); second, the fundamental aims and philosophical programme
in the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ by Horkheimer and Adorno (2);
third, the relation of the later critical theory of Horkheimer and Adorno
to religion and what they called ‘theology’ after the Second World War
(3) and fourth, I shall refer to a criticism of these general theses of
Horkheimer by Jürgen Habermas (4).

Max Horkheimer in 1957 wrote:

Critical Theory displaced theology but has found no new Heaven to
which to point, not even an earthly Heaven. But critical theory can-
not erase the memory of Heaven and will always be asked the way
that leads there, as if it weren’t already a discovery that a heaven, to
which one can point the way, is none at all.

This short description of his philosophical convictions makes clear the
importance of the theme of religion in Horkheimer’s work. It penetrates

193

his entire thought and cannot be separated from his central concerns. If
in his final creative period he was perhaps more clearly concerned with
the object of religion than previously, it can be argued conversely, that
the religious problematic is already closely connected with his writings
of the 1930s.

Horkheimer’s early work for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, like his pro-

grammatic inaugural lecture at the University of Frankfurt and his 1931
lecture as Director of the Institute for Social Research, are characterized by
the attempt to reflect philosophically on an empirical and at the same time
historical conception of social research. Horkheimer sees ‘the present situ-
ation of social philosophy’ as the title of his 1931 lecture puts it, as char-
acterized by an unfruitful side-by-side of positivistic social science, on
the one hand, and a kind of social philosophy, on the other, which looks
to a ‘transpersonal sphere’ of ideally constituted state or humanity or a
‘value in itself’ and views these as ‘more essential, meaningful and sub-
stantial’ than the empirically accessible ordinary world of the individual.
For Horkheimer the criticisms of a positivistic philosophy modelled on
the social sciences that were advanced by the Marburger neo-Kantians as
well as by Hans Kelsen, Max Scheler or Nicolai Hartmann were insuffi-
cient since they criticized neither its methodology nor its concept of
facts, but rather they ‘set them more or less constructively, more or less
“philosophically” over against ideas, essences, totalities, independent
spheres of objective Spirit, unities of meaning, “national characters” etc,
which’ they considered ‘equally foundational – indeed, “more authen-
tic” – elements of being.’

Horkheimer opposes such a concept of philosophy since the relation:

between philosophical and corresponding specialized scientific dis-
ciplines cannot be conceived as though philosophy deals with the
really decisive problems … while on the other side empirical research
carries out long, boring, individual studies that split up into a thou-
sand partial questions, culminating in a chaos of countless enclaves
of specialists.

In contrast, for the Institute for Social Research, Horkheimer pro-

poses a programme of ‘a continuous, dialectical penetration and devel-
opment of philosophical theory and specialized scientific praxis’

which:

philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and psychologists
are brought together in permanent collaboration to undertake in

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common that which can be carried out individually in the laboratory
in other fields. In short, the task is to do what all true researchers
have always done: namely, to pursue their larger philosophical ques-
tions on the basis of the most precise scientific methods, to revise
and refine their questions in the course of their substantive work,
and to develop new methods without losing sight of the larger
context.

With the concept of a dialectical mediation of the individual sciences
and the philosophical question about the totality, Horkheimer returns
to some basic elements of Hegel’s philosophy, insofar as these had
been incorporated into Marxist theory. In contrast to Georg Lukács,
Horkheimer’s reception of Hegel’s philosophy does not extend so far as
to ground a materially oriented universal history and an ‘absolute
knowledge’ of it. Horkheimer’s relation to Hegel is much more deter-
mined by the insight that the doctrine of identity has long broken down
and with it Hegel’s system of idealistic philosophy. But, as Horkheimer
points out, ‘it is easily forgotten all of what it buried with it’.

For Horkheimer an accurate concept of history must take as its start-

ing point a historical-material analysis of human labour in history such
as that of Marx and Engels. In his essay History and Psychology pub-
lished in 1932 in the first volume of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung,
Horkheimer wrote:

Marx and Engels took up the dialectic (of Hegel) in a materialist
sense. They remained faithful to Hegel’s belief in the existence of
supraindividual dynamic structures and tendencies in historical
development, but rejected the belief in an independent spiritual
power operating in history. According to them, there is nothing at
the root of history, and nothing is expressed in history that could be
interpreted as comprehensive meaning, as unifying force, as moti-
vating Reason, as immanent telos.

It is not difficult to see in such formulations the revival of the thought
of Marx and Engel’s German Ideology. When Horkheimer describes
historical materialism as that view of history in which ‘the turn from
metaphysics to scientific theory’ is realized, he acknowledges that even
such an accurate interpretation is vulnerable to being torn apart by
dogmatists. Such dogmatism is always a threat to historical materialism
as Marx understood it. Against Marxist orthodoxy Horkheimer points
out: ‘Marx insists that no insight logically prior to history offers

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann

195

the key to its understanding.’

He underscores both the continuing

indecisiveness and the historical conditionedness of a materialist view
of history as well as its critical function. This is evident when
Horkheimer, in the face of an economic determinist view of history
continued to maintain that human beings are producers of the entire
historical shape of their human life even if this takes place in a con-
strained and irrational form. In this way, Horkheimer shows that the
economic necessity proclaimed by Critical Theory is not as invariant
natural or historical law but the diagnosis of a wrong structure of soci-
ety which has to be overcome. In his programmatic article ‘Traditional
and Critical Theory’ Horkheimer explained that the concept of necessity
is not a descriptive concept but a normative one. That means it presup-
poses the idea of human autonomy as historically possible but not yet
realized in a capitalistic economy. Here Horkheimer returned to insights
of Kant’s philosophy of history, holding to the idea of a future society as
a community of free men.

Kant’s employment of reason for the purpose

of judging and grounding correct action is, like for Hegel and Marx,
retransported into the sphere of historical development. Horkheimer
explains that Critical Theory is linked to the interest of the oppressed in
overcoming the class rule. For him that is the negative circumscription
of the materialistic content of the idealistic concept of reason.

Reason and truth are concepts that Horkheimer’s Critical Theory does

not wish to do without, while not thereby simply returning to the
version of these concepts worked out by Kant and Hegel. Horkheimer is
nevertheless aware of the inevitable problems posed to historical materi-
alism by historical relativism and pragmatism which inform his critique
and renunciation of metaphysics. He attempts to avoid these problems
by holding to a negative notion of truth in the form of a true theory of a
false state of affairs. The model of such a theory is, as he writes in his
1935 essay, ‘The Problem of Truth’, Karl Marx’s systematic presentation
and critique of the bourgeois economy. For Marx ‘reason’ takes the form
of a dialectical critique of the determinations of ‘understanding’ and the
economic categories. This process is in principle infinite since in theory
there is no possibility of reconciling the contradictions which arise in
society. Horkheimer goes beyond the theory itself and looks to the
historical stage when he writes that:

the truth advanced because the human beings who possess it stand
by it unbendingly, apply it and carry it through, act according to it,
and bring it to power against the resistance of reactionary, narrow,
one-sided points of view.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

The question of the truth of thinking has now widened to include the
problem of the truth of historical reality.

The question of the historical form of religion and its claims to truth

is discussed in a series of essays published by Horkheimer in the
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung against the background of his reception of
historical materialism. In this respect they differ from Horkheimer’s
earlier literary essays, for instance the anonymously published collec-
tion of aphorisms Dämmerung in 1934. Hence Horkheimer could write
in his short 1934 article entitled ‘Thoughts on Religion’ that the con-
cept of God includes the idea of a better world. And he concludes that
if justice has to be thought of as identical with God it could not be
present in the world: ‘If justice resides with God, then it is not to be
found in the same measure in the world. Religion is the record of the
wishes, desires, and accusations of countless generations.’

Ludwig

Feuerbach’s theory of religion as espoused in the Essence of Religion is
reproduced by Horkheimer in terms of an analysis of history. Marx in
his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, had already
referred to religion as the expression of the suffering of the creature
and the protest against it and so attempted to describe its relative justi-
fication and at the same time illusory character. Horkheimer’s own
formulations in these years come relatively close to such judgements.
But in contrast to Marx, Horkheimer’s reflections on the illusory char-
acter of religion do not stop there in order to move on to a critique of
law or politics. Horkheimer holds to a notion of God which is not
solely reducible to psychological anthropology, psychology or socially
critical praxis. He writes that we find in ‘God’ the picture of the idea of
‘a perfect justice’, but that idea can never be realized in history since a
better society would never compensate for the suffering of the past. For
Horkheimer, the idea of ‘God’ represents certainly an illusion, but the
concept of God at the same time articulates the lasting universal
human hope for fulfilment beyond the bounds of nature and history:
‘What distinguishes the progressive type of man from the retrogressive
is not the refusal of the idea but the understanding of the limits set to
its fulfilment.’

The theoretically important idea of the ‘infinite’ points to a historical

openness, indeed a metaphysical pessimism already evidenced in his
essays from the 1930s, which is not easy to reconcile with the Marxist
faith in the progressive march of history. In his 1936 review of Theodor
Haecker’s book The Christian and History, Horkheimer notes that the
striving for a universal justice is something about which Marxists agree
with religious people. Horkheimer’s critique of religion in the 1930s

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann

197

did not lead to a new dogmatism or a confession of atheism, which
was propagated by the official Marxism of the day. Rather it was more a
part of his efforts to contribute to a philosophical critique of the limits
of human theoretical or metaphysical knowledge in general. This
moves his philosophy, still concerned as it is like Marx’s with the
capacity of human beings to change the course of history through
their actions, in the direction of Arthur Schopenhauer. It is the dog-
matic optimism of an ‘absolute knowledge’ and the human pride
reflected in the attempt to overcome the limits of human knowledge
which Horkheimer criticizes, in Hegel’s philosophy and in doctrinal
religion as well as in a dogmatic understanding of Marxist theory. His
materialism reflects the ‘consciousness of the finitude of human action
and human insight’ and the ‘bitterness of the death’ as he formulated
it. Precisely such knowledge belongs to the ‘essence’ of materialistic
thinking, since the indignation at the suffering of the majority of
human beings originates in the experience of the uniqueness of
human life and happiness. Horkheimer opposed ‘the ideas of the resur-
rection of the death, the last judgment and eternal life as dogmatisms’
while nevertheless holding to them as expressions of the general
human wish for ‘eternal beatitude’, ‘universal justice and goodness’,
enabling a critique of the status quo and ‘infinitely increasing the soli-
darity with all living things’.

Horkheimer’s further philosophical development is marked by the con-
sciousness of an unavoidable sadness and an attitude of enlightened
pessimism. This mentality mirrors the historical catastrophes of the
twentieth century: the terror and state-organized Holocaust by National
Socialists in Germany but also Stalin’s regime and the machinery of
annihilation of the Second World War which continued until the drop-
ping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. These
events form the backdrop for the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ which
Horkheimer wrote, together with Theodor W. Adorno, while in exile in
California. The book begins with the assertion:

In the most general sense of progressive thought, the Enlightenment
has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing
their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster
triumphant.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Hence it is the intention of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno to
investigate the connection between the catastrophes of the twentieth
century and the programme of Enlightenment. Mistakenly, the essays in
the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ have repeatedly been linked to the post-
modern attack on the modern (Cartesian) notion of the subject and the
ideals of the European and American traditions of the Enlightenment.

By contrast, Horkheimer and Adorno are concerned with salvaging the
programme of the Enlightenment in the face of their current ambiva-
lence and internal contradictions. Thus they write in their introductory
chapter:

The dilemma that faced us in our work proved to be the first phenom-
enon for investigation: the self-destruction of the Enlightenment. We
are wholly convinced – and therein lies our petitio principii – that social
freedom is inseparable from enlightened thought. Nevertheless, we
believe that we have just as clearly recognized that the notion of this
very way of thinking, no less than the actual historic forms – the
social institutions – with which it is interwoven, already contains
the seed of the reversal universally apparent today.

Therein the authors draw the conclusion:

If enlightenment does not accommodate reflection on this recidivist
element, then it seals its own fate. If consideration of the destructive
aspect of progress is left to its enemies, blindly pragmatized thought
loses its transcending quality and, its relation to truth.

Horkheimer and Adorno seek to secure the relation of their thought to
‘truth’ through recourse to Hegelian philosophy: from an analysis of
the ‘Concept of Enlightenment’ its inner ‘dialectic’ as well as its histor-
ical and social reality is to be reconstructed. This method of intellectual
reconstruction of central concepts is taken from Hegel and attempts to
encapsulate the entire historical epoch of modernity and demonstrates
the fundamental contradictions within this concept. Hegel too speaks
of a conceptual unity of ‘presentation and critique’ and employs the
notion of a ‘determinate negation’. But in contrast to Hegel – and here
once again Horkheimer and Adorno follow Marx – they do not expect
a ‘determinate negation’ to overcome and reconcile all contradictions
in the manner of a speculative concept.

In the fundamental programmatic first chapter of the Dialectic of

Enlightenment entitled ‘The Concept of Enlightenment’, Horkheimer

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann

199

and Adorno identify three historical forms of reflection and knowledge
which they recognize as having the potential to break through
the blind inextricable development of the contradictory processes of
Western rationality: these are ‘art’, ‘critical thinking’ and ‘religion’. Here
too we have an analogy with Hegel and the stages of ‘absolute Spirit’
found in his Encyclopedia.

Yet in contrast to Hegel, these moments do

not form a reflectively closed whole, whose highest form is represented
by philosophical thinking. As a result of their critique of Hegel,
Horkheimer and Adorno give a different valuation and assessment of
these concepts from those of Hegel. By ‘art’ they mean authentic
‘works of art’ which were to be found especially but not exclusively in
Modern Art and its abstract form of representation. Commenting on
such ‘authentic’ works of art, they write: ‘With the progress of enlighten-
ment, only authentic works of art were able to avoid the mere imitation
of that which already is.’

It is evident that Horkheimer and Adorno rec-

ognize in art a claim to knowledge, in accord with an acknowledgement
of the biblical injunction prohibiting graven images: ‘The justness of the
image is preserved in the faithful pursuit of its prohibition.’

That

quality links modern art with the tradition of religion. It is above all
this insight into the Jewish tradition that appears to be capable of
breaking through a false enlightenment which Horkheimer and
Adorno see in the positivistic creed prevalent in modern scientific
enterprise. This has become a new myth and led to an enormous
increase in domination. In contrast, Jewish religion broke the power of
the ancient pagan myths by their negation in the name of God:

Jewish religion allows no word that would alleviate the despair of all
that is mortal. It associates hope only with the prohibition against
calling on what is false as God, against invoking the finite as the
infinite, lies as truth. The guarantee of salvation lies in the rejection
of any belief that would replace it: it is knowledge obtained in the
denunciation of illusion.

These two forms of knowledge, ‘art’ and ( Jewish) ‘religion’ point the

way to a philosophical ‘critique’ of the unreason of the positivistic sci-
ence and have the power to break through the system, ‘the absurdity of
a state of affairs in which the enforced power of the system over men
grows with every step that takes it out of the power of nature’.

This

critique ‘denounces the rationality of the rational society as obsolete.
Its necessity is illusive, no less than the freedom of the entrepreneurs

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

who ultimately reveal their compulsive nature in their inevitable wars
and contracts.’

In conclusion, the goal of Horkheimer and Adorno’s study is to show

that:

a thinking, in whose mechanism of compulsive nature is reflected
and persists, inescapably reflects its very own self as its own forgot-
ten nature – as a mechanism of compulsion.

This de-mythologization of positivistic thinking is an expression of the
hope by Horkheimer and Adorno to transcend what they call ‘the false
absolute’ that means the principle of domination.

After his return from exile one searches in vain in Horkheimer’s philo-
sophical writings for a programmatic work expressive of his primary
philosophical concerns. His countless essays and lectures from the
period, often occasional pieces dictated by the demands of the
moment, are materially closely related to his writings in the ‘Dialectic
of Enlightenment’. This holds true for his personally reflective ‘Notes:
1949–1969’ which despite their lack of systematic character are not
without philosophical sharpness.

In his writings after 1950 one is confronted with an increasingly

radical epistemological scepticism and a pessimism about the prospects of
theoretical and practical philosophy. Here one must not forget that
Horkheimer’s interest in philosophy was awakened by his early reading of
Schopenhauer. It was only after his confrontation with Edmund Husserl
and Immanuel Kant that the young Horkheimer turned to Hegelian phi-
losophy and its critical reception by Marx. His philosophy remained
indebted, even in his appeal to the notion of ‘critical social research’, to
Marxian materialism, Kantian criticism and Schopenhauerian pessimism.
The resulting enlightened ‘sceptical materialism’ forms the foil to his
philosophy of religion.

Horkheimer’s concept of philosophy shows itself, in consequence of

his critiques of both a too narrow concept of European Enlightenment
and of the positivism of the sciences, as beholden to a notion of ratio-
nality which holds to the idea of an absolute truth is nevertheless
in principle unattainable to finite human understanding. This corre-
sponds to Schopenhauer’s epistemologically critical insight that the

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world is appearance. The ‘in itself’ of things – that is, their essence
remains unknowable. For Horkheimer every form of metaphysics which
makes claims to knowledge of essences is fundamentally impossible
since it does not correspond to the capacities of finite human under-
standing. However Horkheimer sees that this epistemological scepticism
is subject to an objection which for good reason he does not wish to
contest. Writing with a view to his critique of knowledge he notes that
the entire reflection on the impossibility of philosophy falls under its
own verdict of which it itself consists.

He admits philosophy against

itself is impossible because it asserts the truth of that which it never-
theless denies.

Yet this aporetic insight into the impossibility of

something like a final truth for philosophy, is not itself claimed to be a
final truth. That conclusion would be an ‘idealistic dead-end’, a tres-
passing of the limits and competence of finite human understanding.
‘Can we conclude’, Horkheimer asks:

that because scepticism contradicts itself that some non-sceptical
philosophy, religion or some faith is perhaps justified? No, there is
another conclusion to be drawn: to keep silent. That which has
always been said, is never really said, since he who ought to hear it,
the Infinite One, does not hear it.

Since Horkheimer ties the philosophical idea of a positive fulfilment of
truth claims in human language to the attainment of ‘The Infinite’ but
thinks that this is something reason can neither prove nor positively
deny, human language loses its claim to truth even while ordinary
language and the positive sciences remain bewitched by such language.
As he writes in his ‘Notes’:

language in the emphatic sense, language that wants to claim truth,
is babbling silence, nobody speaks and language does not speak
to anyone. Therefore nothing is true. Not even that we are in the
darkness of night is true, not even that it is not true, is true.

Horkheimer interpreted the logical positivist denial of a transcendental
meaning to the world and the binding character of truth as a sign of the
inevitable decline of the grand tradition of European philosophy. That
this critique of positivism was not linked to the Western tradition of
metaphysics is owing to his epistemological scepticism. His scepticism
resisted affirming that being has the same extension as goodness and

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truth, a conviction of Thomistic as well as Hegelian philosophy. In
accord with the finite constitution of human beings and the conditions
of human knowledge which makes the metaphysical knowledge of
essences impossible, the philosopher cannot presuppose any final
unity of being, truth and goodness. That this was done, especially in
the neo-Platonic tradition of metaphysics, is to be explained by the
human desire for consolation taken over from religion by philosophy.
But the fundamental fact of conditioned finite human knowledge is
the fact of death which is constitutive of the ‘essence’ of human
knowledge. In continuity with the ancient tradition of materialistic
philosophy, Horkheimer contends that his philosophy does not over-
look human mortality.

Kant’s theoretical philosophy is for Horkheimer in a decisive respect

more honest than the tradition of rationalistic metaphysics, against
which Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ is directed. But Schopenhauer’s
metaphysical pessimism which Horkheimer recognizes as having a
high degree of initial plausibility in the face of the actual course of
historical events, trespasses the limits set by Kant’s epistemology in
finding ‘solace’ in the apparent unity of the ‘essence of the world as
will’. Schopenhauer’s metaphysical pessimism turns into its opposite,
namely into an ‘optimistic’ philosophy.

In contrast, Horkheimer, in his ‘Notes’ defends a sceptically grounded

pessimism, which alone corresponds to the materialistic foundations of
philosophy. But in contrast to the essentially ‘religious’ pessimism of
Arthur Schopenhauer, he insists on a ‘philosophical reflection’ which
forthrightly acknowledges the limits of the realization of human striv-
ing toward knowledge and happiness. Assertions about a reality other
than the apparent, real world refer to a region into which one is in
principle unable to enter.

For Horkheimer, the philosophical doctrine of the unknowability of

essences or the things themselves and the impossibility of ‘absolute
knowledge’ does not mean that a philosophical notion of truth should
be replaced by a pragmatic notion of ‘correctness’. First, maintaining
the philosophical pursuit of ‘idea of absolute truth’ while recognizing
the impossibility of its attainment, qualifies Horkheimer’s thought as
pessimistic, as if characterized by a persistent sense of sadness.
Horkheimer speaks, in reference to his thought of a philosophical
‘insight into the powerlessness of the intellectual’.

He interprets this

as the ‘last and final’ insight of which critical philosophy is capable
‘this is the point at which materialism and serious theology coin-
cide’.

What Horkheimer means by this might be explained by a

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203

remark he made in reference to Paul Tillich’s notion of the concept of a
‘boundary’. In his essay ‘Remembering Paul Tillich’ Horkheimer writes:

I have always understood the concept of boundary such that the
philosopher should always see reality as relative which means, that
all of our judgments about reality are not absolute and that the
world, itself relative, presupposes an absolute that we nevertheless
are unable to grasp.

Yet precisely his philosophical insight into the inevitable relativity of
human knowledge presupposes the idea of an ‘absolute truth’ which
the sceptic must nevertheless regard as ‘pure idea’, that is, as beyond
the fulfilment of finite individuals. This pessimistic or sceptical strain
in Horkheimer’s philosophy, viz., of an absolute truth as a non-
relativistic ‘other’ to the space–time world has affinities with theology
and stands in contrast both to an idealistic metaphysics and a positivis-
tic science. Horkheimer argues that without the idea of an absolute truth
and its conditions, knowledge of its opposite, that is ‘the desolateness of
the human being’, is unthinkable. Horkheimer’s philosophy is pes-
simistic, but not cynical. Cynical, by contrast, are those philosophical
doctrines that beyond claiming the end of metaphysics, proclaim the
end of ‘reason’, ‘the subject’ and the ideas of ‘humanity’ and ‘justice’.

The idea of truth, to which Horkheimer holds despite his insight into

its unattainability takes on a critical function within scientific discourse.
Philosophy rejects the assertion of the finite reality as an ultimate deter-
mination and the fulfilment of the concept of truth. This indispensable
and yet unattainable notion of truth is indebted at least to the concept
and the idea of God. With the notion that the unconditioned truth cor-
responds to the concept of God, Horkheimer transcends behind the
contrast between belief and denial of God, or in his words: the false
alternative between theism and atheism. In the past, atheism some-
times has been thought of as a document of freedom of spirit as ‘a wit-
ness to the inner independence and indescribable courage’, but today
theism has taken its place. And indeed, compared with atheism, theism
has had at least one decisive advantage in terms of its inner conceptual
determination: in principle, theism never allowed hatred in the name
of God while hatred and murder can in theory coexist with and some-
times follow from an atheistic view of the world. This judgement does
not undo the injustices perpetrated in the name of God, but it allows a
degree of criticism which does not seem possible for an atheistic reign

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

of terror. Atrocities committed in the name of atheism do not necessary
conflict with its fundamental philosophical tenents.

The concept of God like that of ‘the truth itself’ cannot be given a

definite content, indeed it is fundamentally unknowable. Therefore for
Horkheimer, assertions about the existence of God, the Creator of the
world and the Saviour of humanity are philosophically illegitimate. But
according to Horkheimer within our knowledge of the finite state of the
world an idea of an Infinite is already presupposed. This idea gets its prac-
tical relevance in the ‘human desire for the totally Other’ as well as in the
political struggle for justice and a better world. The practical relevance of
the idea of God which totally coincides with the ideas of the good and
the just does not concede anything to his fundamentally sceptical posi-
tion. Horkheimer’s philosophical objection to a positive human knowl-
edge of God articulates the central concern of his epistemological
scepticism and his Schopenhauerian and Marxist-oriented materialism,
namely the philosophical insight into the finitude of human knowledge,
the limits of reason and limits to human self-realization as a whole.

In his principal philosophical work, ‘Negative Dialectics’ published

in 1966, Theodor W. Adorno speaks of a ‘Passage to Materialism’

which runs like a thread through his entire philosophy. This turn to
materialism is for Adorno a result of a successful search for the true
form of the objectivity of the world, as it is realized in metaphysics and
idealistic philosophy: ‘The innervation that metaphysics might win
only by discarding itself applies to such other truth, and it is not the
last among the motivations for the passage to materialism.’

And

Adorno does not shy away from describing his philosophical position
in paradoxical terms: ‘If negative dialectics calls for the self-reflection
of thinking, the tangible implication is that if thinking is to be true – if
it is to be true today, in any case – it must also be a thinking against
itself.’

Thus for Adorno the concept of ‘matter’ is a place holder for a

concept of reality, idealistic philosophy can only formulate as some-
thing non-intellectual. For Adorno, the concept of ‘nonidentity still
obeys the measure of identity. Emancipated from that measure, the
nonidentical moments show up as matter, or as inseparably fused with
material things.’

This insight allows Adorno’s passage to materialism in the sense of a

priority of the object within the mediation of Subject–Object. This
position agrees with theology insofar as it holds to a hope in a resurrec-
tion of the deaths. ‘At its most materialistic, materialism comes to agree
with theology. Its great desire would be the resurrection of the flesh, a
desire utterly foreign to idealism, the realm of the absolute spirit. The

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205

perspective vanishing point of historic materialism would be its self-
sublimation, the spirit’s liberation from the primacy of the material
needs in their state of fulfilment.

In his discussion of the philosophical development of Horkheimer and
Adorno’s thought since the 1940s, Jürgen Habermas points to some fun-
damental difficulties and aporetic arguments of the so-called ‘older crit-
ical theory’. It is primarily these difficulties which make Horkheimer
and Adorno’s appeal to the concepts and symbols of religion under-
standable; nevertheless Habermas attempts to avoid the difficulties
involved in Horkheimer and Adorno’s arguments by appealing to a
universal pragmatics of language. As a result, Habermas comes to a dif-
ferent conclusion about the function of religion. In his understanding
‘religion’ is not able to compensate for the difficulties or limits of phi-
losophy as it seems to do in the case of Horkheimer and Adorno. For
Habermas, ‘religion’ neither competes with philosophical rationality
nor claims the ability to resolve the problems of a post-metaphysical
theory of reason.

Habermas offers his critique of Horkheimer’s philosophy of religion in

his criticism of the representative essay ‘Theism-Atheism’ published in
1963. There Horkheimer contends that it is ‘vain to attempt to try to pre-
serve absolute meaning without God’.

Habermas rejects Horkheimer’s

argumentation as inappropriate. According to Habermas, Horkheimer’s
philosophical position is based on the practical idea that the darkness
which casts its long shadow upon world history should not have the
last word. In Habermas’s view, Horkheimer thereby shifts the burden of
explaining the historical catastrophes of the twentieth century to the
concept of reason itself so that, indebted to Arthur Schopenhauer as he
is, he no longer trusts a philosophical concept of reason to be able to
positively ground the morally good or at least the morally better act.
So, in Horkheimer’s thought, it is the task of a critical theory of society
to describe historical wrongs or injustices. In accordance with the view
that historical materialism is a theory that describes successive condi-
tions that need to be overcome, it is the task of Critical Theory to con-
tribute to the improvement of the conditions of society by identifying
societal evils and their ‘determinate negation’. It is the weak point in
Horkheimer’s argument that he doesn’t realize that the possibility of
describing something as evil already presupposes the capacity to define

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

the content of the concept of the good or to describe the differences
between ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

Nevertheless, Habermas believes this type of argument confronts

Horkheimer’s philosophically funded Critical Theory of society faced
with a serious dilemma. In comparison with his earlier and seemingly
less presumptuous moral philosophy, the language about an injustice or
wrong which is abolished through a ‘determinate negation’ neverthe-
less presupposes, simply at the level of the description of just or unjust
conditions, the validity of a normative measure of value that must be
philosophically explicated. However, Horkheimer, in Habermas’s view,
fundamentally denies human understanding such a capacity because it
falls under the rule of an entirely formal, instrumental rationality. Since
Horkheimer nevertheless does not want to give up his intention to con-
tribute to the amelioration of social conditions through a critical theory
of society yet no longer trusts human reason to provide a justification
of such improved or normatively valid conditions. Hence Horkheimer
must, according to Habermas, borrow the now antiquated forms of
rationality from a concept of theology amalgamated with an at least
neo-platonic philosophy. This protects the inheritance of an already
obsolete form of ‘substantial reason’.

Even Horkheimer sees that his

own notion of ‘objective reason’

is an appeal to a form of rationality

which had been surpassed by the critiques of eighteenth-century ratio-
nalism, transcendental philosophy and idealism and which would
never again gain ascendancy. Hence Horkheimer is not oblivious to the
philosophical problems of implementing his own proposal. Yet he sees
no alternative to such an ‘anamnetic recourse to the substantial reason
of metaphysical and religious views of life’

in the attempt to search

for an alternative to instrumental reason. Since Horkheimer does not
have any illusions about the inconsistency and fruitlessness of his
appeal to ‘objective reason’, his philosophy offers an ambivalent mes-
sage swinging, as it does, between his own complete despair in reason
and a ‘return to the faith of his forefathers’.

In contrast to Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas adheres to a con-

cept of truth set in terms of his own language-based, pragmatic theory
with the goal of ‘interpreting the resolution of a claim to truth under
the conditions of an ideal communication situation, that is, in an ide-
ally extended social and historical community’.

In the context of an

argumentative exchange between interlocutors whose goal is under-
standing, Habermas maintains that assertions or practical statements
imply validity claims which extend beyond a particular time and place.
In such utterances there is a ‘moment of unconditionedness’ that is

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207

‘deeply embedded in the process of understanding’.

For Habermas

there is in the very character of the communicative situation, a tran-
scendence of language which points to a possible understanding inclu-
sive of future communication partners.

These few remarks about Habermas’s pragmatic interpretation of rea-

son and truth within the context of his ‘theory of communicative
action’ suffice to make clear that for Habermas, in contrast to
Horkheimer, ‘post-metaphysical thinking’ does not require recourse to
‘God or an Absolute’

in order to preserve a ‘meaning of the uncondi-

tioned’.

Rather this ‘unconditioned’ is immanent in the use of lan-

guage itself and the claims to truth and to correctness implicit in the
process of communicative acting. But the ‘unconditioned’ only has
cognitive import if it is ‘justified before the forum of reasoned
speech’

or exposed to discursive scrutiny without qualification. Yet

one must distinguish between what Habermas means by the ‘meaning
of the unconditioned’ and what Horkheimer called ‘the unconditioned
meaning’; for Habermas, the failure of metaphysics since Hegel means
that philosophy can no longer appeal to such a sense of the whole.
Rather, this can only be mediated by religion where people provide
comfort to each other, a task philosophy cannot and does not intend
to replace. Such consolation is that which takes ‘the unavoidable and
innocent injustice, the contingency of misery, loneliness, sickness and
death and throws a different light on it, teaching one to bear it’.

But

in a further sense Habermas can imagine that talk of an ‘uncondi-
tioned meaning’ without reference to God is ‘vain’. In that case we are
not concerned with the possibility of gaining and grounding a funda-
mental normative insight, which is strictly the task of a communica-
tively constituted reason, but with providing a ‘motivating answer’ to
the question why we should act according to our best moral insights,
including the question: why be moral at all?

In view of this funda-

mental ethical problem, Habermas suggests he can ‘perhaps’ affirm the
indispensable ‘meaning of the unconditioned’, explained within the
work and through the tradition of biblical Religion.

Translated by Michael Parker

Notes

1. See Max Horkheimer, ‘Notizen 1950 bis 1969’, in: Gesammelte Schriften,

vol. 6, ed. A. Schmidt and G. Schmid Noerr, Frankfurt am Main, 1991, p. 253.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

2. Max Horkheimer, ‘The Present Situation of Social Philosophy and the Tasks of

an Institute for Social Research’, in: Max Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and
Social Science, Selected Early Writings, trans. by G.F. Hunter et al., Cambridge,
1993, p. 7.

3. Ibid., p. 9.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. See Max Horkheimer, Hegel und das Problem der Metaphysik, Frankfurt, 1971,

p. 90.

7. Max Horkheimer, ‘History and Psychology’, in: Between Philosophy and Social

Science, op. cit., p. 116.

8. Ibid.
9. See Max Horkheimer, ‘Traditionelle und Kritische Theorie’, in: Critical Theory.

Selected Essays, trans. by M.J. O’Connell et al., New York, 1995, pp. 188–243.

10. Max Horkheimer, ‘On the Problem of Truth’, in: Between Philosophy and

Social Science, op. cit., p. 193.

11. See Max Horkheimer, ‘Thoughts on Religion’, in: Critical Theory. Selected

Essays, op. cit., p. 129.

12. Ibid., p. 130.
13. Horkheimer/Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming,

New York, 1994, p. 3.

14. See, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne,

Frankfurt, 1985, pp. 130–57.

15. Horkheimer, Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p. xiii.
16. Ibid.
17. See G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline,

§§ 553–77.

18. Horkheimer/Adorno, ibid., p. 18.
19. Ibid., p. 24.
20. Ibid., p. 23.
21. Ibid., p. 38.
22. Ibid., p. 38 f.
23. Ibid., p. 39.
24. See Max Horkheimer, ‘Notizen 1950 bis 1969’, op. cit., p. 320.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid., p. 321.
27. Ibid.
28. Horkheimer, ‘Schopenhauer als Optimist’, in: ‘Notizen 1950 bis 1969’,

op. cit., pp. 387–8.

29. Horkheimer, ‘Gegen die Philosophie’, in: ‘Notizen 1950 bis 1969’, op. cit.,

p. 281.

30. Ibid.
31. See Horkheimer, ‘Erinnerung an Paul Tillich’, in: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 7,

Frankfurt, 1985, p. 279.

32. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E.B. Ashton, New York,

1992, p. 192.

33. Ibid., p. 364 f.
34. Ibid., p. 365.
35. Ibid., p. 193.

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann

209

36. Ibid., p. 207.
37. See Max Horkheimer, ‘Theism and Atheism’, in: Critique of Instrumental

Reason, trans. by M. O’Connell et al., New York, 1974, p. 47.

38. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Einen unbedingten Sinn zu retten ohne Gott ist

eitel’, in: M. Lutz-Bachmann/G. Schmid Noerr, Kritischer Materialismus,
Munich, 1991, pp. 125–42.

39. See Max Horkheimer, ‘Zur Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft’, in : Gesam-

melte Schriften, vol. 6, Frankfurt/M., 1991, esp. pp. 27–74, 165–86.

40. Jürgen Habermas, op. cit., p. 134.
41. Ibid., p. 131.
42. Ibid., p. 139.
43. Ibid., p. 140.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., p. 141.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Israel und Athen oder: Wem gehört die anamnetische

Vernunft?’, in: Diagnosen zur Zeit, Düsseldorf, 1994, pp. 57–64.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Critical Theory and Religion

Maeve Cooke

Critical theory is a theory of society with a ‘practical intent’: a theory
concerned with investigating the potentials for freedom, justice and
happiness in actual historical social systems with a view to transforming
them accordingly. As a normative theory of society it both diagnoses
the causes of social evils and points the way towards better – more
rational – forms of social life. This holds both for early critical theorists
such as Max Horkheimer as well as for contemporary heirs to the tradi-
tion such as Jürgen Habermas. Critical theory is thus not primarily a
theory of knowledge or a theory of truth – indeed, not even primarily a
theory of justice or of freedom – although such theories form an
important part of its endeavours. Bearing in mind its practical orienta-
tion towards society as a whole, my essay initially focuses on the fol-
lowing question: what distinctive contribution, if any, does religion make
to a critical social theory? Here I concentrate on the work of (the early)
Horkheimer. In the second section, I consider some points of conver-
gence between Horkheimer and Habermas. Here, the problem of truth
emerges as a potential challenge for critical theory.

A concern with religion is evident throughout Horkheimer’s writings
although, as a number of commentators have observed, it appears to
play a more prominent role in his later writings than in his earlier
ones.

However, I leave aside questions concerning the development of

Horkheimer’s thought in the following. Instead I want to draw atten-
tion to the principal functions that he assigns to religion and to the
idea of God, respectively, and consider their status within his critical

211

theory of society. This will necessitate, in turn, a brief discussion of
what he understands by materialism.

Dialectical materialism and the social contribution
of religion

It is striking how often religion features in Horkheimer’s essays of
the 1930s. Although only a few of these are concerned primarily with
the question of religion, references to religion can be found in almost
all of his essays on topics as diverse as the ‘problem of truth’, ‘philo-
sophical anthropology’, ‘materialism and morality’, ‘materialism and
metaphysics’, or ‘egoism and the liberation movement’. It is also striking
that these remarks are almost equally critical of religion and favourable
to it. This is at least partly explicable in terms of his dialectical material-
ist standpoint. In keeping with this standpoint, Horkheimer assesses
religion as either a progressive or regressive social force, depending on
the specific functions it assumes in concrete historical circumstances.
Since in the present context we are considering the question of religion’s
distinctive contribution to a critical theory of society, my focus is on its
progressive aspects. I argue that religion, even when it assumes progres-
sive social functions, either makes no distinctive contribution to critical
social theory as conceived by Horkheimer or makes one that is highly
ambivalent. The idea of God, by contrast, plays a crucial role in his
critical theory – but mainly, I contend, in a negative sense, released
from a positive religious framework.

Horkheimer’s assessment of the function of religion must be under-

stood against the background of his dialectical materialism. His version
of this theory owes evident debts to the thinking of Hegel and Marx. It
follows Hegel in its adoption of the method of determinate negation as
central for the process of ascertaining truth. Determinate negation is a
critical method that starts by exposing the one-sided and conditioned
character of concepts, proceeding then to re-examine and reinterpret
these concepts in light of their limitations, through reference to a gen-
eral (normative) theory.

It follows Marx in its rejection of idealism.

Materialism rejects the view that conceptually grasping the condi-
tioned and transitory nature of prevailing ideas is synonymous with
overcoming them. Instead it emphasizes transformatory praxis: it
insists on the necessity and possibility of overcoming existing condi-
tions of suffering and oppression through collective human action.

However, Horkheimer not only follows Marx in his materialist, praxis-
oriented, interpretation of the Hegelian dialectic, he also diverges from

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Hegel in a second respect. In contrast to Hegel – and some versions of
Marxism – he stresses that the dialectic is in principle open-ended.

When he writes that ‘in materialism the dialectic is not deemed to be
concluded’, he not only rejects idealism: he also affirms the notion of
a negative dialectic that maintains an insurmountable discrepancy
between human thought and reality.

According to this negative inter-

pretation of the dialectic, the progress of history is a struggle to realize
human ideas in praxis that can never be concluded. As we shall see, this
assertion of an ineradicable disjunction between concept and object is
one reason why the idea of God is held to embody a moment of truth.

The starting point for Horkheimer’s version of dialectical materialism

is the need for a better order of things to be achieved through transfor-
mation of existing historical reality. This better order of things – which
is the normative notion guiding the dialectical method of determinate
negation – is conceived neither formally nor abstractly.

Rather, it is

given a concrete content and shape by the interests and desires of
actual human beings as they have been articulated in historical strug-
gles to overcome suffering and oppression.

On Horkheimer’s reading

of history, human beings have historically been motivated by the
desire for justice in the sense of overcoming inequality

– a desire that

has been given a universalist interpretation only under conditions of
modernity

– and by a longing for happiness and freedom.

There can,

of course, be no guarantee that future generations will continue to be
inspired by these aims

– this aspect of materialist theory is one reason

for Horkheimer’s pessimism in his later writings. However, in the
essays written in the 1930s, Horkheimer is confident that affectively
based motivation of this kind is widespread:

he discerns in bourgeois

society a moral feeling akin to love that desires the free development of
the potentialities of each and every human being, and that finds
expression in the twin reactions of sympathy for neediness and suffer-
ing and a politics aimed at the happiness of human beings in general.

Dialectical materialism is primarily a theory of transformatory praxis.

Nonetheless, its view of knowledge as guided by human interests,
which both arise out of, and have the power to transform, historical real-
ity, has implications for the perspective it takes on religion. On the
dialectical materialist view, the reciprocal conditioning of knowledge
and reality has a double aspect: on the one hand, it has a genealogical
aspect in that it refers to the origins of concepts and theories in histori-
cally specific social constellations; on the other hand, it has a normative
aspect, for it requires ideas and theories to respond appropriately to the
(historically specific) interests and desires of human beings. If we keep

Maeve Cooke

213

these two aspects distinct we can see that dialectical materialism does
not reduce the spiritual to the material, even though it often gives a
materialist explanation of the genesis and development of religious
(and moral) beliefs and practices. For example, Horkheimer on occa-
sion offers a materialist account of the historical connection between
keeping promises and the economic relations of capitalism,

between

the modern conception of God and the capitalist principle of
exchange,

and between religious faith and the failure to transform

undesirable social structures;

importantly, however, he distinguishes

between a materialist account of the historical roots of morality and reli-
gion and the question of the value of the beliefs and practices he men-
tions. For Horkheimer, the value or significance of any ideas, principles,
theories, knowledge, and so on depends on the overall state of society
and on the concrete situation to which they belong.

More fundamen-

tally, as we have seen, the ultimate point of reference for determining
value or significance is a normative, historically grounded, theory of
human interests and desires, and of the kind of social structure deemed
appropriate for their satisfaction.

It is clear from the foregoing, therefore, that, according to

Horkheimer’s materialist view, there can be no abstract answer to the
question of whether religious faith is a positive or negative social force.
The value or significance of religious beliefs and practices always
depends on the historically specific social situation in which they are
formulated. For this reason, it comes as no surprise that in his various
writings Horkheimer both criticizes religion and draws attention to its
positive potentials. For example, he is critical of religion insofar as it plays
down the importance of insight into the earthly order of things (thus rel-
egating social problems to second place), by turning the minds of human
beings towards a more essential order.

Or, again, he questions Christian

claims to selflessness, arguing that supposedly selfless Christians are in
fact more egoistic than atheistic freedom fighters who, by renouncing
the hope of reward in an afterlife, are willing to sacrifice their lives
for the good of human beings in general.

In addition, he criticizes

Christianity’s unwillingness to acknowledge the brutality that has been
part of human nature historically; instead it has justified its own brutal
acts through appeal to the ‘name of God’, leading to a repression of
brutality rather than an attempt to deal with it rationally.

On the

other hand, Horkheimer acknowledges that atheism can be sympto-
matic of a kind of intellectual passivity that fails to recognize what is
wrong with the bourgeois social order and lacks any desire to change

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it.

Implicit in this assessment of atheism is the basic yardstick used by

Horkheimer to measure the social contribution of religion.

As he sees it, religion can be regarded as a positive social force on

two main counts. The first has to do with its moral message, the sec-
ond with its orientation towards an idea of the absolute.

Religion’s moral message

Religion is a progressive social force insofar as it preaches a moral message
of human dignity and universal solidarity that inspires criticism of pre-
vailing suffering and oppression. For Horkheimer, the proclamation of
the infinite value of the human person, of the innate rights of the indi-
vidual, the fight against ideologies of race, nation and ‘Führertum’, are
part of a humanistic message propagated by some strands of Christianity
that can motivate social struggle for a better society.

It should be noted

here that Horkheimer distances himself from the spiritual justification
offered in support of religiously motivated messages of human dignity
and solidarity, insisting that the struggle for a better order of things has
no need of appeals to absolute meaning

or to an absolute demand

(Forderung) upon human beings.

He sees ‘man’s striving for happiness

[as] a natural fact requiring no justification’.

Feelings of revulsion

against, and solidarity with, suffering and oppression are sufficient – feel-
ings that neither require nor permit justification.

Indeed, Horkheimer

is emphatic that morality cannot be justified – neither through intu-
ition nor through arguments.

As he sees it, all value judgments are

unfounded.

There are no binding moral commands: ‘Materialism dis-

cerns no authority transcending human beings that could distinguish
between helpfulness and greed for profit, goodness and brutality,
covetousness and self-sacrifice.’

All religious attempts to find a divine

justification of morality are thus ideological. Nonetheless, Horkheimer
recognizes that under certain circumstances religious messages can
serve to reinforce the desire for happiness and feelings of solidarity
with suffering, thereby strengthening the incentive for social transfor-
mation. In such situations a temporary alliance between materialist
thinkers and religious thinkers may be desirable – but only insofar as
both aim for a better society.

For our present purposes, two points are

particularly relevant. First of all, religion’s progressive social function is
conditional: the value of its moral message depends on whether or not
it links up with the above-mentioned feelings to inspire transformatory
praxis. In Horkheimer’s view, this link is purely contingent for, like
every idealistic philosophy, religious ideas can easily justify any kind of

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attitude to existing society – a critical or an apologetic, a reactionary or
a rebellious one.

Second, religion is replaceable as the vehicle of the

moral message of universal human dignity and solidarity. Even if, his-
torically, religion has been one of the most powerful means of convey-
ing this message, the truth of the message is dependent on religion
neither for its justification nor for its dissemination. As we have seen,
Horkheimer holds that morality cannot be justified. In addition, there
is nothing about religion that makes it inherently better suited than
non-religious belief systems to act as a vehicle for moral ideas; indeed,
its intrinsic idealistic element makes it less suited to this task than
materialism is. When, in 1935, Horkheimer writes that, today, ‘good
will, solidarity with misery and the striving for a better world have cast
off their religious mantle’, he clearly approves of the development.

Religion’s orientation towards the idea of God

Religion does, however, have one distinctive characteristic – a feature
peculiar to religious belief – that makes it a potentially progressive social
force. This is its orientation towards the idea of God. Unfortunately, it is
precisely this characteristic that makes it equally a potential force for
social regression. Horkheimer asserts an intimate connection between
the idea of God and the idea of the absolute: that is, projections of
absolute meaning, final knowledge, perfect justice, ultimate truth and
so on. There is an oft-cited phrase from his later writings that runs:
‘Without God one will try in vain to preserve absolute meaning.’

For

the early Horkheimer, at least, the relationship between materialism
and absolute meaning is highly ambivalent; furthermore, his approval
of the idea of God, insofar as it is unconditional, is an approval of a
negatively construed idea of God that is essentially non-religious.

From the point of view of Horkheimer’s critical social theory, the

idea of the absolute is both desirable and dangerous. On the one hand,
the idea of the absolute expresses the longing of human beings for
perfection – a longing that is the utopian counterpart to the feelings
(of desire for happiness or of solidarity with suffering) that Horkheimer
presents as historically articulated psychological attributes of human
beings.

It is the idea of an alternative, better order of things: ‘For a

long time the concept of God preserved the idea that there are alterna-
tive standards to those that find expression in the operations of nature
and society … Religion records the wishes, desires and protests of
countless generations.’

Even materialists – who know that the idea of

perfection is a potentially ideological illusion – long for eternal, perfect

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justice for all human beings.

The underlying impulse towards tran-

scending the given – or even the possible – in thought is regarded by
Horkheimer as part of what is to be human (which, of course, is a
historical category).

As he sees it, what distinguishes the progres-

sive type of human being from the retrogressive one is not rejection
of visions of transcendence but rather recognition that perfection
can never be achieved.

Thus, for example, like Walter Benjamin,

Horkheimer maintains that perfect justice can never be realized in the
world, for even if contemporary injustice were to give way to a more
just social order, the misery of bygone generations would not have
been made good and the suffering of the rest of nature would still
remain.

In contrast to religious thinkers, materialists acknowledge

that the demand for perfection can never be fulfilled; Horkheimer
maintains that this accounts for a certain melancholy discernible in
materialist writings, while insisting that melancholy feelings do not
constitute a reason for continuing to embrace the illusion.

At least in

his early writings, Horkheimer holds that materialists must acknowl-
edge the illusionary character of their longing for perfection, retaining
only the valuable impulse at the heart of it. This is the impulse towards
social struggle to overcome the imperfections of existing social reality.

However, the idea of the absolute is also an illusion that is poten-

tially ideological and dangerous. In affirming the idea of salvation in
the hereafter, it directs attention away from suffering and oppression
in concrete social reality and runs the risk of making religion a cog in
the wheel of the totalistic state (totaler Staat).

Furthermore, the idea

of the absolute as a meaningful object of human knowledge rests on the
assumption of a possible reconciliation between concept and object
that effects a closure of the dialectical process of history. To be sure, the
idea of God can also prevent closure. As we shall see, when integrated
within a materialist theory, the idea of the absolute is precisely the idea
that there is no end-point of history. Paradoxically, however, the idea
of God contains a moment of truth only when it is construed nega-
tively and released from its connection with positive religious beliefs,
rituals and practices.

Again, two points should be emphasized here. The first is that, for

Horkheimer, the value of the religious idea of God is conditional: it is
dependent on whether the idea of an alternative to the existing order
translates into actual transformatory social action. To be sure, under
certain social conditions (for instance, twentieth-century consumer
capitalism) feelings of solidarity with suffering and desire for happi-
ness, which are the main motivation for transformatory praxis, may

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wane or even disappear. In such situations the religious idea of God
cannot easily connect up with these feelings, and struggle to overcome
suffering and oppression is unlikely to result. Even here, however, reli-
gion’s usefulness remains linked to the idea of transformatory struggle,
for the religious idea of God is valuable only insofar as it keeps alive
the insight that an alternative to the existing social order is a possibil-
ity for human action.

The second point is that the religious idea of

God, although it expresses a genuine human longing for eternity and
perfection, is an illusion. Unlike the content of religion’s moral mes-
sage, the religious idea of God has an inherently idealistic element that
makes it ideological. This is the cause of its ambivalence. It is because it
is so ambivalent that Horkheimer advises materialists to recognize that
their longing for the absolute cannot be satisfied. They should relin-
quish the illusion, retaining only its fruitful impulse: the need for a
dynamic transcending of the existing order through transformatory
praxis.

I have suggested that, for Horkheimer the ideological character of

the religious idea of God threatens to obscure its moment of validity.
In his view, in order to preserve its valid insight, the idea of God has to
be released from its positive religious framework. Only as a negatively
construed, non-religious idea of the absolute does it play a central role
in Horkheimer’s dialectical materialism. To grasp this role we must take
a brief look at his theory of truth.

Horkheimer’s theory of truth

According to this theory, truth can never be defined in abstraction
from the historically articulated interests and desires of human beings:
truth is always historically conditioned, it is never abstract or timeless;
furthermore, the process of cognition includes actual historical action
just as much as experience and understanding.

Horkheimer’s theory

of truth is guided by this emphasis on historically based interests,
desires and actions and has two important components. The first of
these is the notion of ‘corroboration’ (Bewährung), the second is the
method of determinate negation.

The pragmatist idea of Bewährung – the view that something is true

only insofar as it can be corroborated, in the sense of ‘proves its worth’,
‘turns out to be true’

– plays a central role in Horkheimer’s materialist

theory.

With its emphasis on concrete historical action and its refer-

ence to human interests and desires, it is easy to see why this idea is
congenial to materialism. Horkheimer refers to the American pragmatist

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philosophers, John Dewey and William James, while acknowledging that
the idea of Bewährung goes back much further. In the recent German
tradition he cites Goethe and Nietzsche as proponents of it: both regard
something as true only insofar as it proves to be fruitful, connects up
with other true beliefs and is life-enhancing.

Horkheimer, too, insists

that the verification and truth of ideas pertaining to human beings and
social orders does not simply consist in laboratory experiments or in
research activity but in historical struggles in which convictions play
an essential role.

He maintains that ‘so long as experiences gained

through perception and inference, methodical research and historical
events, everyday work and political struggles, withstand the cognitive
tests available at any given time, they are true.’

He sees the notion of

Bewährung as particularly important for materialist theory in that it
acts as a weapon against all forms of mysticism: it attacks the thesis of
a transcendent, superhuman truth that, instead of being accessible in
principle to experience and praxis, remains the preserve of the revealed
knowledge of a chosen few.

Despite the clear affinities between this

aspect of materialist theory and the American pragmatists, however,
Horkheimer underscores a fundamental distinction. As he sees it, con-
temporary pragmatists such as Dewey and James hold a view of social
reality that is too harmonious. He attributes to them a boundless con-
fidence in the world as it actually exists.

Far from constituting the

theory’s organizing principle, the need for change, if it is perceived at
all, is seen as a subjective preference.

From the point of view of mate-

rialism, the crucial deficiency of contemporary pragmatism is its lack
of reference to a general (normative) theory of society.

Such a theory

is necessary if the notion of Bewährung is to avoid the twin dangers of
subjectivism and uncritical affirmation of the status quo. For this reason,
Horkheimer joins the idea of Bewährung to the dialectical method.

As we have seen, this operates by way of determinate negation. The

dialectical materialist starts with the conceptual principles and stan-
dards of an object, unfolding their implications and consequences. It
then re-examines and reassesses the object in light of these implica-
tions and consequences. The result is a new understanding of the
object in which the original image of the object is transcended and the
object itself is brought into flux. As Horkheimer (with Adorno) formu-
lates it: determinate negation rejects defective ideas of the absolute by
‘interpreting every image as writing’ – by showing how the admission
of its falsity is to be read in the lines of its features.

This process of

critical examination and reinterpretation of concepts is guided by a
general theory. In Horkheimer’s case, the normative component of the

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theory is derived from an account of human interests and desires, as
these have been articulated historically.

As we have also seen, this

theory is progressive but open-ended: absolute knowledge – and, in
consequence, an endpoint of history – is inconceivable. However,
although Horkheimer, at least in his early writings, rejects the idea of
absolute knowledge as an achievable – or even meaningful – goal of
human action, the idea of the absolute does play a role in his negative
dialectics.

Absolute knowledge is inconceivable for human beings and unat-

tainable through human action. As such it is not a meaningful goal for
materialists. Nonetheless, despite its illusory (and, as we have seen,
potentially ideological) character, it plays a role in materialist theory.
Its significance is that it marks the impossibility of closure. The essen-
tial open-endedness of the progress of history means that human
beings’ desire to overcome the limitations of their given historical con-
dition through transformatory praxis can never be satisfied. In contrast
to religious thinking, in which the idea of the absolute signifies the
possibility of eternal, perfect truth, justice, or meaning, it has a nega-
tive, critical, function in materialist thinking. In illustration
Horkheimer gives the example of the Jewish prohibition against nam-
ing the absolute with names: the ‘prohibition against calling on what
is false as God, against invoking the finite as the infinite, lies as
truth’.

Thus, the idea of God as it functions within Horkheimer’s ver-

sion of dialectical materialism is a negative image that can be described
as religious only in a derivative sense. More precisely, despite its reli-
gious origins, it can be described as a negatively construed, non-
religious idea of God insofar as it lacks the framework of positive belief
and concrete rituals and practices in which it has always been embed-
ded in the main religious traditions.

Summary

Summarizing, it can be seen that religion either makes no distinctive
contribution to a critical theory of society as conceived by Horkheimer
or else one that is highly ambivalent. Although under certain condi-
tions it may assume the role of a progressive social force, its value and
significance is contingent on a number of factors. In addition, it is
replaceable by non-religious kinds of beliefs as a vehicle for progressive
social action. Finally, it can just as easily inhibit the struggle for more
rational forms of social life as promote it. By contrast, an idea of God
plays a crucial role in his critical social theory insofar as it marks the

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impossibility of closure, thereby testifying to the need for never-ending
struggle to achieve a better order of things. Due to the inherently ideo-
logical character of religious interpretations of the idea of the absolute,
however, this idea is most useful when it is released from its religious
framework and understood in a purely negative, critical way.

Habermas’s critique of Horkheimer’s idea of God

It has been argued, however, that the idea of God fulfils positive func-
tions in Horkheimer’s later writings. The later Horkheimer, it is claimed,
asserts a connection between absolute validity and unconditional
meaning and the idea of God as arbiter of validity and bestower of
such meaning. Habermas, for example, reads the later Horkheimer in
this way. As a result, he accuses him of bad utopianism.

Habermas criticizes the role played by religion in Horkheimer’s later

work. He attributes to him the position that truth and meaning have a
necessary connection with the idea of God. He takes this idea to com-
prise at least two positive components.

The first of these is the idea of God as arbiter of truth (understood as

validity in general). As Habermas reads the later Horkheimer, when
critical theory loses its basis in the philosophy of history and when
reason in its context-transcendent sense has been eclipsed completely
by instrumental reason, religion remains as the sole authority that, if
only it were recognized as such, would permit distinction between
what is true and what is false, between what is moral and what is
immoral.

Thus, on Habermas’s reading, the later Horkheimer anchors

truth (including moral truth) ontologically in a divine power.

The

second component is the idea of God as bestower of comfort or conso-
lation:

the idea of God, when construed in a positive way as salva-

tion, draws together the disparate elements of human life to form a
meaningful totality; its integrating power serves to reassure human
beings that life is ultimately meaningful.

Again, when critical theory

can no longer find potentials for transformatory social struggles in the
philosophy of history, and rationality is reduced to instrumental reason,
religion remains as the sole authority that might be able to give a
meaning to life beyond that of mere self-preservation.

On Habermas’s reading, Horkheimer is guilty of bad utopianism.

He regards his recourse to a positive idea of God as an escape from
history to messianic visions, comparing it to Adorno’s messianic inter-
pretation of the truth of art. For Adorno the utopian content of the truth
of art preserves a form of knowledge that, because it is dependent for

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its transformatory power on interpretation by philosophical reason,
constitutes a genuine yet impotent alternative to the instrumental ratio-
nality pervading all aspects of social life in the contemporary world.

Such utopianism is bad utopianism to the extent that it explodes the
continuum of history: religion or art are assigned a purely messianic
power for redemption that has no roots in the concrete social practices
of real historical human beings. Such a notion of redemptive reason is
aporetic insofar as it fails to link up with reason as embodied in the
historical world of speech and action. The difficulties arising from this
view of reason constitute the main reason for Habermas’s endeavour
to lead critical theory out of what he sees as a theoretical impasse –
an impasse into which it was led by Horkheimer and Adorno with their
jointly written Dialectic of Enlightenment.

Once Horkheimer and

Adorno:

‘lost their historico-philosophical faith in the rational potential of
bourgeois culture which was to be set free in social movements
under the pressure of developed forces of production … the principal
‘lever’ of the theory was also lost … instrumental reason, having
become total, embodies itself in totalitarian society. With this the
classical form of critical theory fell apart.’

In response to this collapse, Habermas attempts to show that a poten-
tial for non-instrumental rationality is inherent in the real historical
world of human speech and action; his strategy initially takes the form
of a theory of knowledge and human interests,

and subsequently that

of a linguistic theory: the programme of formal pragmatics.

By contrast with what he sees as Horkheimer’s anchoring of reason in

the divine, Habermas defends the possibility of a notion of reason
anchored in everyday communication, whose context-transcending
power derives from the necessary presuppositions of discursive practices
that have their basis in the everyday linguistic behaviour of historically
situated agents. In his view, such a conception of communicative ratio-
nality preserves the meaning of the absolute without recourse to
metaphysics.

Its transcendent character is a transcendence not from

and into the Beyond, but a transcendence from within and into the
lifeworld.

Insofar as his reading of him is correct, Habermas’s rejection of the

later Horkheimer’s position is understandable. From the point of view
of a materialist social theory concerned with bringing about more
rational forms of human life, the connection of truth and meaning

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with a positively construed idea of God is potentially risky. One possible
danger is that the truth of the theory, having lost its empirical anchor
in historically articulated human desires, needs and feelings, might
become accessible only to religious believers. Another is that appeal to
a positively construed idea of the absolute might encourage belief that
the progress of history is divinely guaranteed, thus inducing passivity
and impeding transformatory social praxis. Much depends, however,
on the precise interpretation that normative social theory gives to a
positively construed idea of God. For example, it makes an important
difference whether knowledge of the divine will or being is conceived as
subject to the constraints of history and context. For the assumption
that the hand of God guides the progress of history is readily compati-
ble with the view that human beings gain knowledge of God’s guiding
hand only by way of essentially fallible processes of interpretation.
It also makes a difference whether or not free will is attributed to
human beings. For the above assumption is equally compatible with
the view that human beings have the freedom to disregard the divine
guidance offered.

For this reason, it is relatively unimportant whether

Habermas’s reading of Horkheimer is the most plausible one.

The

point is that even a positively construed idea of the absolute does not
imply that human beings can have absolute knowledge of it; nor does
it imply that the progress of history is guaranteed independent of
human agency.

Habermas’s critical social theory shares with Horkheimer the practical
aim of bringing about more rational forms of human life. It also shares
one central element of what Habermas refers to as the postmetaphysical
impulse. This is its concern to examine the possibilities for a better life
for human beings without relying primarily on philosophical insight
for justification of the enterprise: for both, philosophy has lost its
traditional status as a mode of knowledge with special insight into the
nature of the human.

Despite their common aim and overlapping

strategy, however, the two projects differ in a number of crucial ways.
For example, despite a shared emphasis on the need for cooperation
with the social sciences,

Horkheimer and Habermas pursue different

strategies when it comes to finding an alternative mode of grounding
for their theory. Whereas Horkheimer, as we have seen, derives the
normative basis for his critical theory from human interests and desires
as articulated over the course of history in social struggles, Habermas

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223

hopes that the rational reconstruction of everyday linguistic behaviour
will provide a normative underpinning for his theory.

Since a full

exploration of the various points of divergence is beyond the scope of
the present chapter, my discussion focuses primarily on some points of
convergence and divergence between Horkheimer and Habermas with
respect to religion and the idea of the absolute. I first show how Haber-
mas, like Horkheimer, maintains a connection between the idea of
truth and a negatively construed idea of absolute. Unlike Horkheimer,
however, Habermas insists that it is also possible and desirable to
connect truth with a positively construed yet postmetaphysical idea of
the absolute. I argue that Habermas’s attempt to salvage a postmeta-
physical conception of the positive aspect of truth is not successful.
I then draw attention to some points of agreement between
Horkheimer and Habermas concerning the question of the validity of
religious ideas. However, here too there is an important disagreement.
Unlike Horkheimer, Habermas concedes the possibility of religious
truth. I argue, however, that accommodating such a notion would entail
substantial revision of his formal pragmatic theory of validity claims.

Habermas’s theory of truth

Discussion of Habermas’s theory of truth is hampered by the fact that
he has substantially amended the theory of truth which he presented
in his 1973 essay, ‘Wahrheitstheorien’, without having fully developed
a new, revised version.

However, some of his recent essays can be

seen as part of an endeavour to make good this deficiency.

For our

present purposes, it is especially important that Habermas continues to
emphasize the difference between justification and truth.

For exam-

ple, in a recent critique of Richard Rorty, Habermas associates himself
with Rorty’s pragmatist understanding of truth, while accusing him of
a problematic naturalization of it.

Rorty is criticized for reducing

truth to justification, thus losing sight of the potential power of
validity claims to explode actual contexts of justification. Habermas, by
contrast, wants to hold onto the moment of ‘unconditionality’ (Unbed-
ingtheit) that he regards as inherent in the idea of truth, while retaining
an internal relation between truth and justifiability. Habermas’s aim, in
other words, is to work out a theory of truth that is inherently prag-
matic yet retains the notion of truth as a claim to ‘unconditionality’
that reaches beyond all the evidence available to us at any given time.

Although his emphasis on the unconditional nature of truth has

remained unaltered, Habermas has recently moved away from his

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well-known account of truth as idealized rational acceptability.

now proposes a view of truth as a concept that has a ‘Janus-face’. On
this understanding, the concept of truth has two aspects: a discursive
one and a pragmatic, lifeworld one. On the one hand, truth is the
concern of participants in certain kinds of rational discourse who are
guided by the idea that a proposition, if true, would withstand any
attempts to refute it under ideal justificatory conditions. On the other
hand, truth is a pragmatic presupposition of participants in everyday
communicative practices in the lifeworld who are guided by the need
for behavioural certainty. Truth’s ‘Janus-face’ refers to the dynamic
interplay between everyday behavioural certainties and the process of
critical rational discussion of these certainties once they fail to prove
reliable as a basis for action in the lifeworld; the fallible results of such
processes of rational discussion (‘discourses’) are fed back as ‘truths’
into the everyday communicative practices of the lifeworld. They then
provide a reliable basis for action until, for contingent empirical
reasons, they no longer ‘work’ – that is, no longer prove their truth
(sich bewähren) by being proof against disappointment – and have to be
reassessed discursively in the light of the new evidence and insight.

The idea of truth as a Janus-faced concept is supposed to show why

truth is distinct from justification. It is helpful here to distinguish
between two aspects of Habermas’s idea of truth as justification-tran-
scendent.

The first aspect is its cautionary function: the concept of

truth warns us that even propositions that are justified under the best
possible argumentative conditions may turn out to be false. Here, the
context-transcendent power of truth is interpreted negatively as a warn-
ing about the fallibility of knowledge. The second aspect is the sense of
unconditionality we attach to truth: truth is a property that cannot be
lost.

Here, the context-transcendent power of truth is interpreted

positively as the idea of perfection. One advantage of this distinction
between a positive and negative aspect of Habermas’s idea of the
justification-transcendent character of truth is that it enables us to see
clearly how his concept converges with, and diverges from, the nega-
tive and positive interpretations of the idea of the absolute offered by
Horkheimer.

There are evident links between Horkheimer’s defence of the idea of

God in its negative, non-religious interpretation and Habermas’s
defence of the ‘cautionary’ function of the truth predicate. This is one
of the main agreements between Horkheimer and Habermas as regards
the function of the concept of truth. On my reading, both theorists
uphold a negative interpretation of the idea of the absolute. For

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225

Horkheimer, a negatively construed idea of God reminds us of the
essential open-endedness of the dialectical process and marks the
impossibility of closure. For Habermas, the ‘cautionary’ use of the truth
predicate warns us that even rationally justified propositions may turn
out to be false, signifying the fallibility of human knowledge. Both
agree, therefore, that the concept of truth reminds us of human imper-
fection. But there is also an important point of disagreement. This con-
cerns truth in its positive aspect.

I have attributed to Horkheimer the view that, in its positive inter-

pretation, the idea of the absolute promises perfection. I then argued
that – at least in his early writings – he ultimately rejects a positive
interpretation of the idea of the absolute on the grounds that it is illu-
sory and potentially ideological. There are evident links between
Horkheimer’s idea of the absolute as perfection and Habermas’s idea of
‘unconditionality’. However, whereas Horkheimer thinks the dangers
of the idea of perfection outweigh its acknowledged attractions and
merits, Habermas proposes a postmetaphysical interpretation of this
idea. But even Horkheimer’s rejection of a positively construed concep-
tion of truth is not straightforward. As we have seen, he is deeply
ambivalent about the idea of the absolute as perfection. Although, at
least in his early writings, he ultimately recommends that materialists
relinquish a positively construed idea of the absolute on grounds of
its illusory, potentially ideological character, he fully acknowledges the
attraction of the idea: even materialists, he writes, long for eternal, perfect
justice for all human beings. This longing expresses an impulse towards
transcending the given that is part of what it means to be human and
can have positive, transformatory, social effects. Horkheimer’s ambiva-
lence here suggests that he would welcome the possibility of a
non-illusory – and, for him, this means materialist – conception of the
absolute in its positive aspect. Habermas’s postmetaphysical interpreta-
tion of the idea of ‘unconditionality’ can be regarded as an attempt to
provide such a conception.

As we know, Habermas claims that the idea of the absolute must be

conceived as ‘transcendence from within and into the lifeworld’. Our
specific concern in the present instance is with the idea of the absolute
in its positive interpretation, as expressed by his idea of ‘unconditional-
ity’. As we also know, Habermas now conceives of truth as a Janus-faced
concept that faces in the direction both of rational discourses and of
the lifeworld. Whereas discourses remind us of the fallibility of knowl-
edge (the negative aspect of the idea of the absolute), the lifeworld
reassures us of the unconditionality of truth (which I have referred to as

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

its positive aspect). We could also say: it reassures us of the objectivity –
of the necessity and universality – of the true propositions that are the
pragmatic basis for the behavioural certainties that guide us in our
everyday practices in the lifeworld.

Habermas stresses that action

requires us to assume the unconditional truth of what we take to be
true. ‘We would step on no bridge, use no car, undergo no operation,
not even eat an exquisitely prepared meal if we did not consider the
knowledge used to be safeguarded, if we did not hold the assumptions
employed in the production and execution of our actions to be true.’

There is thus ‘a practical necessity to rely intuitively on what is uncon-
ditionally held-to-be-true’.

He also expresses this as the need for par-

ticipants in lifeworld action-contexts to be realists:

Because acting subjects have to cope with ‘the world’ [that is, with a
world presumed to be objective in the sense of identical for every-
one and not at anyone’s disposal – MC], they cannot avoid being
realists in the context of their lifeworld. Moreover, they are allowed
to be realists because their language games and practices, so long as
they function in a way that is proof against disappointment, ‘prove
their truth’ (sich bewähren) in being carried on.

Critique of Habermas’s postmetaphysical ‘idea of God’

However, Habermas’s attempt to salvage a positively construed idea of
the absolute without recourse to metaphysics is not successful.

His

idea of ‘unconditionality’ appeals to a normative notion of ‘coping
with reality’ that relies in turn on what he calls a ‘weak’ naturalist –
and ultimately metaphysical – assumption about the progress of
history. In order to see this we must look more closely at his pragmati-
cally rooted notion of ‘unconditionality’.

Habermas argues correctly that everyday action in the lifeworld

requires us to behave as though we are realists, in the sense of pragmati-
cally supposing the existence of an objective world, that is, of a single
world, essentially identical for all of us and with some independence of
our observations. At the same time, as he himself acknowledges, the
fallibilist consciousness that guides participants in discourse also reacts
back upon everyday practices without thereby destroying the dogma-
tism of the lifeworld: ‘For actors, who as participants in argumentation
have learned that no conviction is proof against criticism, develop in the
lifeworld, too, rather less dogmatic attitudes toward their problematized
convictions.’

Here, too, Habermas is correct. Human agents, when

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they act as participants in everyday practices in the lifeworld, have to
presuppose unconditional truth for pragmatic reasons; however, they
can also be aware reflexively of the pragmatic reasons motivating their
assumption. In other words, it is not just behavioural certainties that
have to ‘work’ in the sense of enabling agents to cope with reality; the
idea of ‘unconditionality’ itself has to ‘work’ in the same sense. If it no
longer enabled human agents to cope with reality, they would be justi-
fied in abandoning it. Put in this way the problem is clear: in Haber-
mas’s account, the positive aspect of the concept of truth has its basis
in a pragmatic notion of coping with reality. This notion is, however,
neither self-evident nor normatively neutral but rather an evaluative
standard that itself requires justification. ‘Coping with reality’ implies
that there are better and worse ways of relating to reality. Our concep-
tions of what counts as better and worse ways depend in turn on
evaluative interpretations of human flourishing, which themselves
depend on some kind of normative – and ultimately metaphysically
based – theory of the progress of history. The normative theory on
which Habermas relies is a ‘weak’ naturalist one.

The theory is naturalist insofar as it relies on the basic assumption

‘that the organic equipment and cultural way of life of homo sapiens
have a ‘natural’ origin and are accessible in principle to explanation by
evolutionary theory’.

Its naturalism is ‘weak’ insofar as it is nonreduc-

tionist. It does not replace conceptual analysis with natural scientific
explanation; nor does it reduce the communicative practices of the life-
world to, for example, neurologically or biogenetically explicable opera-
tions of the human brain.

Habermas claims that his ‘weak’ naturalism

makes just one fundamental metatheoretical assumption. It assumes
that ‘our’ learning processes – those possible within the framework of
socio-cultural forms of life – in a certain way merely continue
antecedent ‘evolutionary learning processes’ that have in turn given
rise to the structures of our forms of life.

However, even this ‘weak’ naturalist account of the progress of history

relies on a metaphysical assumption. We can see this if we look more
closely at Habermas’s argument, which appears to have the following
logic. On Habermas’s account, natural evolutionary processes are
‘coping’ processes – processes of solving problems and dealing with dis-
appointed expectations – that lead to ever more complex levels of devel-
opment. Whereas these processes may in fact be purely contingent, we
impute to them a cognitive context. This supposition is necessary if we
are to be able to conceive of socio-cultural processes as learning
processes. In other words, the attribution of a cognitive content to the

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practices that make possible ‘our’ socio-cultural forms of life requires us
to impute a cognitive content to natural evolutionary processes.

However, as is evident from the above reconstruction, Habermas’s

argument does not explain why we are entitled to speak of ‘learning’ in
either case. Rather, it relies on the metaphysical assumption that
human beings unavoidably conceive of the progress of history as learn-
ing – as a process of acquiring knowledge – and not as a cognitively
irrelevant, purely contingent shift from one perspective to another. It is
this ‘metaphysical’ assumption that underlies Habermas’s ‘metatheo-
retical’ assumption of the continuity between socio-cultural and evolu-
tionary learning processes as a first principle that cannot be disproved.

In the end, therefore, Habermas is unable to salvage the positive

aspect of the idea of absolute – the idea of ‘unconditionality’ or perfec-
tion – without recourse to metaphysics. However, as I have suggested
in the first section, this need not be cause for concern. It is not the fact
that normative social theory ultimately relies on metaphysics that is
problematic but the tendency to deny the effects of history and con-
text and the importance of human free will. It is not metaphysics that
normative social theory has to guard against but rather the view that
access to perfect knowledge is available and the view that the progress
of history towards perfect knowledge and perfect justice is guaranteed.

For our present purposes, this rehabilitation of metaphysics has an

important consequence. It opens the possibility of debate as to the
respective merits of the various kinds of metaphysical assumptions that
unavoidably underlie the idea of the progress of history. For there is, of
course, no need to accept the particular metaphysical assumption on
which Habermas’s theory relies. What is required, rather, are processes
of unconstrained, hermeneutically oriented dialogue with those who
hold competing views of the progress of history. Such dialogues would
permit discussion of the advantages and limitations of Habermas’s
‘weak’ naturalist position vis à vis other normative accounts of the
progress of history – including ones that assume the benign guidance
of a divine will or being.

Habermas and the validity of the semantic contents
of religion

There are also points of convergence and divergence between
Horkheimer and Habermas with regard to the validity of religious
ideas. Both agree that the validity of the semantic contents of religion

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229

is independent of the religious context in which they originated. How-
ever, only Habermas concedes the possibility of religious truth.

Habermas and Horkheimer agree that the value or importance of the

semantic contents of religion is independent of the origins of these con-
tents. For example, the validity of moral ideas of human dignity and
universal solidarity can be assessed quite independently of the religious
framework in which they were initially formulated. More comprehen-
sively than Horkheimer, who tends to focus on religiously based moral
ideas, Habermas recognizes the religious origins of the key normative
conceptions guiding the project of a critical theory of society. Habermas
acknowledges that normative ideas of fundamental importance to
modern Western self-understanding (and to a critical theory concerned
to explore the emancipatory potentials of this) such as ethics and
morality, person and individuality, freedom and emancipation, cannot
be grasped without ‘appropriating the substance of the Judaeo-Christian
understanding of history in terms of salvation’.

He refers to this as a

‘semantic reservoir (of potential meanings)’ (semantisches Potential) that
has to be mastered anew by every generation.

At the same time, how-

ever, Habermas, like Horkheimer, distinguishes between the origins of
ideas – their genealogy – and their importance. Moreover, like
Horkheimer – although for different reasons

– he holds that religious

justifications of moral ideas are not possible: the disenchantment of the
world that follows in the wake of the European Enlightenment means
that morality can no longer look to religion for support for the truth of
its claims. According to the post-Enlightenment picture, reason is dif-
ferentiated, split up into various moments of rationality: for Habermas,
the Kantian trio of truth, morality and taste is paradigmatic for this
differentiation. As a result of the disintegration of reason into its vari-
ous moments, claims to moral validity – like truth and aesthetic valid-
ity – now constitute a distinct mode of rationality with its own internal
standards of justification. For this reason, under conditions of moder-
nity, moral (and other) insights originally articulated in a religious
framework must be subjected to a process of critical appropriation and
transformation if they are to be recuperated within the universe of
justificatory modes of speech.

This holds not just for moral ideas but

for semantic contents in general. Habermas refers to the need for
methodological atheism in dealing with the semantic contents of reli-
gion: under conditions of modernity, neither philosophy nor critical
theology

can simply appeal to divine revelation for justification of

religious ideas but must rather subject them to argumentative testing
in the appropriate types of discourse.

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At times Habermas has suggested that the philosophical task of critical

appropriation and transformation of the semantic contents of religion
is now concluded – that the valuable content of religion has been
translated without remainder into the basic principles of a universalist
ethics of the type he proposes.

More recently, there is evidence of

willingness to acknowledge that the task is still ongoing: ‘The process
of critical appropriation of the essential contents of the religious tradi-
tion is still in process, its results hard to foresee.’

He allows that post-

metaphysical philosophy will be able neither to replace nor displace
religion so long as the language of religion carries with it inspirational
or, possibly, even indispensable semantic contents that cannot – per-
haps – be fully captured by philosophical language and still await
translation into justificatory discourses.

100

Habermas’s formal pragmatics and religious truth

If we consider more closely what is at issue here, we can see that it is
the question of religious truth. From the point of view of Habermas’s
theory, semantic contents may be of different types: they can, for
example, be moral, aesthetic, or religious. We may presume that the
predicate ‘religious’ applies when the experience from which they
derive is a religious one; let us further presume that religious experi-
ences can be described in positive terms, for example, as the feeling
that there is an ultimate purpose to human life that makes it meaning-
ful. Such experiences cannot as a rule be replaced by arguments:
no-one who is unconvinced of the existence of God, for instance, is
likely to be convinced of it solely through participation in discourse.
Religious conviction seems to rely on an indispensable dimension of
personal experience that is a necessary precondition for participation in
discussion on matters of religious validity, and that provides the
motivating force for argument. It is for this reason that religious truth
is deemed to lay claim to a kind of validity that is only partially dis-
cursive. Thus, when Habermas concedes the possibility of specifically
religious semantic contents that will always in part resist attempts to
translate them into the language of justificatory discourse, he appears
to be conceding the possibility of religious truth. If this is the case, it
would constitute a further important difference between Horkheimer
and Habermas. Although Horkheimer, as we have seen, asserts a con-
nection between truth and a negatively construed idea of the absolute,
at least in his early writings he argues against a theory of truth that

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231

relies on a positively construed idea. His theory thus rules out any posi-
tive conception of religious truth.

101

In conclusion, I would like to make two points. The first – shorter –

point is that there is an unmistakable note of caution in Habermas’s
writings as regards the possibility of non-discursively recuperable
semantic contents, and particularly so when he refers to religious ones.
At most, Habermas concedes the possibility of specifically religious
semantic contents that would always resist translation into the language
of justification: he by no means agrees that such contents exist.

102

At best, his position with regard to the question of religious truth
seems to be that the jury is still out on whether it should be taken seri-
ously. The second – longer – point is that it is far from clear how the
notion of religious truth can be accommodated within the framework
of Habermas’s critical theory.

The challenge posed by religious truth

Habermas proposes a schema of validity claims that arguably fails to do
justice to the multiplicity of modes of potentially rational everyday
language use.

103

The question of religious truth highlights some of the

difficulties of his schema.

For our present purposes, the main difficulty with Habermas’s theory

of validity claims is that the claims to religious truth raised by religious
believers do not fit easily into either of the two broad categories identi-
fied by Habermas. Habermas distinguishes broadly between validity
claims that can be vindicated in discourse and those that cannot. This
distinction corresponds to his distinction between universal and non-
universal validity claims. Discursively redeemable validity claims are
universal in that they rest on the assumption that, if valid, everyone
who participated in a discourse satisfying certain demanding condi-
tions would have to agree with this judgement.

104

It is important to

note here that, on Habermas’s conception, agreement reached between
participants in discourse is always agreement in a strong sense: partici-
pants agree to accept a validity claim for the same reasons.

105

Non-

discursively redeemable validity claims are non-universal in the sense
that they do not rest on this assumption of universal agreement.
Habermas sees empirical and theoretical truth claims, on the one hand,
and claims to moral validity, on the other, as examples of discursively
redeemable – universal – validity claims. We will recall that, for Haber-
mas, one aspect of the Janus-faced concept of truth is that we deem a
proposition true if it withstands all attempts to refute it under the

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

demanding conditions of rational argumentation. The connection
between moral truth and argumentation is even more intimate as
Habermas asserts an internal link between the two. On his account, the
moral validity of a norm or principle is conceptually tied to a discur-
sively achieved consensus to the effect that it is equally in the interests
of all affected. In the case of questions of moral validity, universal agree-
ment achieved under ideal justificatory conditions does not simply
authorize validity, it guarantees the rightness of moral judgements.
In short, whereas Habermas insists on the disjunction between truth
and justification, he defends a purely epistemic conception of moral
truth. Idealized rational acceptability exhausts the meaning of moral
validity.

106

By contrast, claims to aesthetic and to ethical validity fall into the

category of non-discursively redeemable claims. For Habermas, ethical
(as opposed to moral) validity claims cannot be vindicated discursively
because they are always bound to the subjective perspective of a partic-
ular individual (or collectivity).

107

Ethical deliberation involves the

hermeneutic clarification of an individual’s (or collectivity’s) self-
understanding and raises clinical questions of a happy or not-failed
life.

108

Ethical validity claims are thus always context-specific. They are

not capable of commanding argumentatively achieved universal agree-
ment but only, at most, the agreement of a particular group that shares
a horizon of contingent cultural values.

109

Habermas also characterizes aesthetic validity claims as context-

specific. Like ethical claims they are held to depend on particularist
cultural values and thus not to transcend local boundaries. For this
reason they do not constitute universal validity claims that can be vin-
dicated in discourse.

110

In addition, Habermas now emphasizes the

world-disclosing function of works of art and literature. If I understand
him correctly, this world-disclosing function suggests a further reason
why aesthetic validity claims cannot be vindicated in discourse (we
shall see that the argument here is also relevant in the case of religious
validity claims).

In recent years Habermas has repeatedly drawn attention to the

power of works of art (and literature) to disclose the world in a new
way. Aesthetic claims refer to semantic contents that cast a new light on
all aspects of reality and that have to be experienced personally as
world-disclosure before they can be understood. The validity of aes-
thetic claims thus refers to the work of art’s ‘singularly illuminating
power to open our eyes to what is seemingly familiar, to disclose anew
an apparently familiar reality. This validity claim … stands for a potential

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233

for “truth” that can be released only in the whole complexity of life-
experience.’

111

Although Habermas has not worked out the details of

this conception of aesthetic validity, the logic of the argument seems
clear. I take his argument to run as follows.

If aesthetic validity claims refer primarily to an experience that shows

us the world in a new way, potentially changing every aspect of our
everyday life, the conditions for achieving agreement in discourse
become even more demanding. In addition to satisfying presuppositions
governing the conduct of argumentation (such as the requirement that
only the force of the better argument obtains), participants would have
to have undergone a similar world-disclosing experience that resulted
in their seeing the world in a similar (new) way. Furthermore, this
similar experience would have to be translatable for all affected by it
into a mutually intelligible discursive language. Otherwise, discursively
achieved universal agreement on the ‘truth’ of the work of art would
be impossible. The difficulties involved in meeting these additional
conditions make aesthetic claims unsuitable candidates for inclusion in
the category of claims that can be vindicated in discourse. Whereas dis-
cursively reached universal agreement as to the validity of aesthetic
claims is not in principle impossible, it would be so difficult to achieve
that the idea of an idealized rational consensus would be robbed of its
purpose: it could no longer serve as a criterion – or even guideline – for
adjudicating aesthetic validity.

Their unsuitability as objects of a discursively achieved consensus

means that aesthetic validity claims cannot, for Habermas, count as uni-
versal.

112

However, he does not appear to see this as cause for concern.

Indeed, Habermas reinforces the thesis of their non-universality insofar
as he seems to confine the world-disclosing power of works of art and
literature to a culture of experts, maintaining that it requires transla-
tion by such experts before it can be made accessible for lay persons.
More precisely, in the modern world, aesthetic experience is held to be
the object of the specialized discourses of experts (in this case, literary
or art critics) and thus split off from everyday life-experience.

113

requires mediation by literary or art criticism before it can have an
impact on everyday language and behaviour.

114

Such criticism ‘accom-

plishes a process of translation of a unique kind. It draws the experien-
tial content of the work of art into normal language … This innovative
potential then finds expression in the changed composition of an
evaluative vocabulary – in the renovation of value-orientations and
need interpretations – which alters the tincture of modes of life
through altering modes of perception.’

115

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

I do not want to pursue the question of whether Habermas’s character-

ization of aesthetic validity claims is convincing. My main point in the
present context is that Habermas explicitly compares and contrasts reli-
gious validity claims with aesthetic ones.

116

On his – admittedly sketchy –

account, religious claims, like aesthetic ones, refer to an experience of
world-disclosure that, as I have shown, creates problems so far as their
possible vindication in discourse is concerned. Because claims to religious
validity, like aesthetic claims, presuppose a personal world-disclosing
experience as a necessary condition for participation in argumentation,
the likelihood (under conditions of modernity) of achieving universal
agreement in discourse is so remote as to make nonsense of universal
consensus as a criterion of religious truth – or even as a guideline for
ascertaining it. However, although a common reference to world-
disclosing experience connects religious claims with aesthetic ones,
there are also two important points of difference.

First of all, by contrast with aesthetic claims (as conceived by

Habermas), religious claims are not the prerogative of experts in a par-
ticular field of specialization but are raised by ordinary participants in
everyday practices of speech and action. Habermas acknowledges that
the claims to religious truth raised by religious believers take place
within the lifeworld, that is, on the level of everyday communication
and action. To confine world-disclosing religious experience to the spe-
cialized discourses of experts (in this case, theologians) would amount
to a complete neutralization of its experiential content: if its experien-
tial content is not to be neutralized, therefore, religion has to assert its
holistic position in the lifeworld.

117

Secondly, religious claims, unlike aesthetic ones, are not bound to

the contingent subjective values of individuals or groups but are rather
universal in aspiration. Habermas explicitly acknowledges the universal
orientation of theological claims.

118

Admittedly, as a discourse among

experts, (critical) theology fulfils the Habermasian requirement that
truth claims be formulated in the specialized language of discursive jus-
tification. But, as Habermas clearly recognizes, theological discourses,
if they are to be distinguishable from philosophical discourses, have to
take seriously the claims to truth raised by religious believers. If theology
were to adopt the ‘methodological atheism’ appropriate for philosophy
in dealing with religious semantic contents, it would undermine the
entire theological enterprise. For this reason, at least some of the truth
claims raised by theology merely articulate at a higher level the claims
to truth raised by religious believers in their everyday lives. In other
words, the theological claims that articulate religious validity claims

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235

are structurally similar to them. Therefore, what holds for theological
validity claims must also hold for religious claims: their claim to valid-
ity is not restricted a priori to the experiential basis of a particular culture
or context but transcends all purely local boundaries. This creates
problems for Habermas’s theory, however, for truth on his view must
be capable of being vindicated in discourse.

119

Religious experiences

would thus have to be translatable into the language of scientific
discourse – and, as we have seen, there are serious difficulties here.
From the point of view of Habermas’s theory of validity claims, the
main problem is the following: The claims of religious believers (which
form the basis for many theological claims) cannot be vindicated in dis-
course and are thus non-universal. For this reason they cannot be com-
pared with claims to theoretical or empirical truth, or with claims to
moral validity. At the same time, as he acknowledges, they are neither the
prerogative of a specialized culture nor are they bound to particularist
and contingent cultural values. For this reason they cannot be com-
pared with claims to ethical and to aesthetic validity. Habermas is thus
left in the position of apparently recognizing the holistic and universal
thrust of religious validity claims while denying them their entitlement
to the predicate ‘truth’.

As I see it, there are two paths open to Habermas here. One possibility

is to leave his schema of validity claims as it is and find some way –
however awkward – of subsuming religious validity into one or other
of his two broad categories. The second possibility, which I favour, is a
fundamental reconsideration of his theory of validity. Although I have
not been able to show this in the present context, I think there are
serious problems, in particular, with his accounts of ethical and of
aesthetic validity. One problem here is his tendency to reduce the
notion of ‘experience’ to empirical experience based on observation or
controlled scientific experiment. Only experience of this kind is admit-
ted by Habermas as evidence for argument in specialized discourses
concerned with truth claims. In his recent writings, however, he seems
to hold a broader view of the kind of evidence that may count as a reason
in discursive processes of justification. In the case of moral discourse, for
example, he now acknowledges that moral feelings count as relevant
reasons.

120

This suggests that ethical, aesthetic, and religious feelings

and experiences might also count as evidence when participants in dis-
courses argue on disputed matters of validity. Admittedly, the question
of how such evidence can be processed is a difficult one. For, against
Horkheimer, it can be argued that the mere presence of a feeling or
assertion of an experience is not sufficient: we need to find a vantage
point that would permit a critical perspective on subjective feelings

236

Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

and experiences.

121

Nonetheless, if Habermas’s theory is to do justice to

ethical, aesthetic, and religious truth it must penetrate deeper into the
relationship between argument and the varieties of human experience.

Notes

1. Mathias Lutz-Bachmann offers a good overview of the development of

Horkheimer’s thinking with respect to religion, drawing attention both to
the line of continuity between the early and later Horkheimer and the
pessimistic turn that characterizes his philosophy in the later period. See
M. Lutz-Bachmann, ‘Humanität und Religion. Zu Max Horkheimers Deutung
des Christentums’, in A. Schmidt und N. Altwicker (eds), Max Horkheimer
heute: Werk und Wirkung, Frankfurt am Main, 1986 and M. Lutz-Bachmann,
‘Erkenntniskritik und Gottesidee im Späwerk Max Horkheimers’, in M. Lutz-
Bachmann (ed.), Kritische Theorie und Religion, Würzburg, 1997. See also
J. Habermas, ‘Max Horkheimer: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte seines Werks’ in
his Texte und Kontexte, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991.

2. As far as I can see, this general theory, as conceived by Horkheimer, has a

diagnostic component and a normative one. Its diagnostic component
requires of it interdisciplinary research methods: in order to ascertain correctly
the causes of social evils it must enter into a relationship of cooperation with
the social sciences (cf. M. Horkheimer, ‘Critical Theory and Traditional
Theory’, in his Critical Theory, trans. by M. O’Connell, New York: Continuum,
1972, p. 233). Its normative component requires of it an account of human
interests and desires, as these have been articulated historically in social
struggles (see note 51 below), and an account of the social structures most
appropriate for satisfying these. Particularly in the case of the latter, critical
theory draws on the methods and findings of various social sciences, for
example, on those of political economy (see, for example, M. Horkheimer,
‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, in Critical Theory, pp. 42–6).

3. Horkheimer insists that materialist theory is primarily a theory of transforma-

tory praxis. He criticizes the frequent misinterpretation of it as a response to
metaphysical questions (for example, as an attempt to explain the ‘enigma of
being’). It is then reduced to the simple claim that only matter and its move-
ments are real. Against this, Horkheimer stresses that materialism is defined
principally in terms of the tasks it sets itself, specifically the overcoming of
human suffering and oppression. (See his ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’,
pp. 10–21.)

4. Horkheimer accuses Hegel of maintaining the possibility of a perfect reconcil-

iation between concept and object, and hence of concluding the dialectical
process of thought or history (see, for example, M. Horkheimer, ‘Problem
der Wahrheit’, in his Kritische Theorie, vol. 1, edited by A. Schmidt, Frankfurt
am Main: Fischer (1968); M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming, New York: Continuum, 1972, p. 24.
I leave open the question of whether his interpretation of Hegel is correct.

5. Horkheimer, ‘Problem der Wahrheit’, pp. 242–3.

Maeve Cooke

237

6. Horkheimer is critical of Kantian formalism, claiming that the emptiness of

its conception of morality is one reason why people seek to escape from it
to more substantial religious views (cf. ‘Problem der Wahrheit’, pp. 236f.).

7. Horkheimer, ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, pp. 45–6; M. Horkheimer,

‘Materialismus und Moral’, in Kritische Theorie, vol. 1, pp. 108–9.

8. Horkheimer, ‘Materialismus und Moral’, p. 97ff.
9. Ibid., p. 100.

10. M. Horkheimer, ‘Bemerkungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie’, in

Kritische Theorie, vol. 1, p. 210 (cf. also ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, p. 44).

11. Horkheimer, ‘Bemerkungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie’, p. 208.
12. Horkheimer does suggest that this incentive is felt particularly strongly by

the social class that suffers most from the capitalist system – which in the
1930s he held to be the proletariat (cf. ‘Materialismus und Moral’, p. 104);
nonetheless, he does not restrict the desire for a better order of things to
this social class.

13. Horkheimer, ‘Materialismus und Moral’, p. 94ff.
14. Horkheimer offers such an explanation in ‘Bemerkungen zur philosophischen

Anthropologie’, p. 213.

15. Horkheimer suggests that the principle of free and equal economic

exchange leads to an idea of human beings as beings without a name or a
place or a specific destiny, an idea that is essential to the modern conception
of God: see his ‘Zu Theodor Haeckers “Der Christ und die Geschichte”’, in
Kritische Theorie, vol. 1, p. 371.

16. Horkheimer, ‘Problem der Wahrheit’, p. 234.
17. Horkheimer, ‘Problem der Wahrheit’, p. 245; ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’,

p. 11ff.

18. Cf. Horkheimer, ‘Problem der Wahrheit’, pp. 258–9; ‘Materialismus und

Moral’, pp. 108–9.

19. Horkheimer, ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, p. 26.
20. Horkheimer, ‘Zu Theodor Haeckers “Der Christ und die Geschichte”’,

pp. 370–1.

21. M. Horkheimer, ‘Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung’, in Kritische Theorie,

vol. 2, edited by A. Schmidt, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1968, p. 80.

22. Horkheimer, ‘Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung’, p. 47. The phrase used by

Horkheimer here is ‘Atheist aus intellektueller Bedürfnislosigkeit’.

23. Horkheimer, ‘Zu Theodor Haeckers “Der Christ und die Geschichte”’,

pp. 365–6.

24. Horkheimer, ‘Bemerkungen zur philosophischen Anthropologie’, p. 207.
25. Horkheimer, ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, p. 27; ‘Bemerkungen zur

philosophischen Anthropologie’, p. 211.

26. Horkheimer, ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, p. 44.
27. Horkheimer, ‘Materialism and Metaphysics’, p. 45; ‘Bemerkungen zur

philosophischen Anthropologie’, p. 211; ‘Materialismus und Moral’, p. 106.

28. Horkheimer, ‘Materialismus und Moral’, p. 93.
29. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 94.
30. Horkheimer, ‘Materialismus und Moral’, p. 93.
31. Horkheimer, ‘Problem der Wahrheit’, pp. 275–6; cf. also ‘Zu Theodor Haeckers

“Der Christ und die Geschichte”’, p. 366.

32. Horkheimer, ‘Zu Theodor Haeckers “Der Christ und die Geschichte”’, p. 366.

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33. M. Horkheimer, ‘Gedanke zur Religion’, in Kritische Theorie, vol. 1, p. 375.
34. M. Horkheimer, ‘Theism and Atheism’, in his Critique of Instrumental Reason,

trans. by M. O’Connell and others, New York: Continuum, 1974, p. 47.

35. Cf. Horkheimer, ‘Materialismus und Moral’, p. 93.
36. Horkheimer, ‘Gedanke zur Religion’, p. 374.
37. Horkheimer, ‘Zu Theodor Haeckers “Der Christ und die Geschichte”’, p. 372.
38. Horkheimer, ‘Gedanke zur Religion’, p. 375.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid. For a brief discussion of Benjamin’s notion of anamnetic solidarity, see

J. Habermas, ‘A Reply to my Critics’, in J.B. Thompson and D. Held (eds),
Habermas: Critical Debates, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981, pp. 246–7.

41. Horkheimer, ‘Zu Theodor Haeckers “Der Christ und die Geschichte”’, p. 372.
42. Horkheimer, ‘Gedanke zur Religion’, pp. 375–6.
43. Horkheimer, ‘Theism and Atheism’, pp. 47ff.
44. Horkheimer, ‘Problem der Wahrheit’, p. 247.
45. The German term ‘sich bewähren’ may be translated as ‘corroboration’ or

‘proving to be true’, in the sense of turning out to be true, standing the test,
withstanding critical scrutiny (note its connection with wahr, true). Where
confusion is likely I use the German term.

46. Horkheimer, ‘Problem der Wahrheit’, pp. 249ff.
47. Ibid., pp. 249–50.
48. Ibid., p. 245.
49. Ibid., p. 246.
50. Ibid., p. 254.
51. Ibid., pp. 251ff. It could be argued that in taking its orientation from histor-

ically articulated interests and desires Horkheimer’s own theory is open to
the charge he levels against pragmatism (that is, of boundless confidence in
the world as it actually exists). In my view Horkheimer avoids this accusa-
tion insofar as he insists on a discrepancy between human interests and
desires and their satisfaction under given social conditions. Social struggles
are practical testimony to the gap between aspiration and actualization; the
method of determinate negation is the theoretical tool designed to expose
it. To be sure, the possibility of this gap rests on certain – possibly con-
tentious – normative, naturalist presuppositions about the moral validity of
desires and feelings.

52. Horkheimer, ‘Problem der Wahrheit’, p. 252.
53. Ibid., p. 253.
54. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 24.
55. See notes 2 and 51 above.
56. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 23ff.
57. Habermas, Texte und Kontexte, pp. 110ff.
58. Ibid., pp. 105–6.
59. Ibid., p. 119.
60. Ibid., p. 125.
61. Habermas emphasizes the influence on Horkheimer of Schopenhauer’s thesis

of the unity of all forms of life (see Texte und Kontexte, p. 120). Although he
does not draw this conclusion explicitly, one could say that in the modern
world the function of the idea of God as consolation is connected not just
with its ability to project a reconciliation between the individual and the

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collectivity but also with its ability to effect a unity between the disparate
aspects of an individual human life.

62. Habermas, Texte und Kontexte, pp. 105–6.
63. Ibid., p. 97.
64. Ibid., p. 103.
65. See J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, trans. by

T. McCarthy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984, pp. 377ff.

66. Habermas, ‘A Reply to my Critics’, p. 232.
67. J. Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. by J. Shapiro, London:

Heinemann, 1972.

68. J. Habermas, ‘What is Universal Pragmatics?’ in M. Cooke (ed.), Habermas:

On the Pragmatics of Communication, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998,
pp. 21–104.

69. Habermas, Texte und Kontexte, pp. 119–20.
70. The title of Habermas’s essay in his Texte und Kontexte is: ‘Transzendenz von

innen, Transzendenz ins diesseits’. An approximate translation is: ‘Tran-
scendence from within, transcendence into this world’.

71. It also makes a difference at which level the idea of God enters the theory. Else-

where I have argued that normative social theory requires a two-step justifica-
tory strategy. In addition to a mode of justification that appeals to normative
standards immanent to a given cultural and social context, it must also justify
these fundamental normative standards through reference to a normative
account of the progress of history. I contend, furthermore, that a normative
account of the progress of history ultimately cannot avoid relying on a meta-
physical assumption, be this a naturalist, rationalist or religious one. At this
level, the metaphysical assumption of a divine will or a divine being competes,
for example, with a metaphysical assumption of the necessary evolution of the
species. See M. Cooke, ‘Between “Contextualism” and “Objectivism”: the
Normative Foundations of Social Philosophy’, Critical Horizons, 1, 2 (2000).

72. In my view, there is a line of continuity running through Horkheimer’s

writings that enables us to interpret even the later Horkheimer’s notion of
absolute meaning in a purely negative way: as signifying the impossibility
of closure. However, since this issue is likely to be of interest mainly to
scholars of Horkheimer, I do not wish to pursue it further here.

73. Habermas stresses this affinity between his theory and Horkheimer’s when

he writes: ‘For Horkheimer “materialism” always also had the connotation
of being critical of philosophy: it stood for postmetaphysical thinking.’ (Texte
und Kontexte, p. 92).

74. Both Horkheimer and Habermas share an emphasis on the need for an

interdisciplinary approach to a critical theory of society (see, for example,
Horkheimer, ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’, p. 233; J. Habermas, ‘Philoso-
phy as Stand-In and Interpreter’ in his Moral Consciousness and Communica-
tive Action, trans. by C. Lenhardt and S. Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1990, pp. 1–20).

75. See Habermas, ‘What is Universal Pragmatics?’ For a discussion of Habermas’s

linguistic grounding of critical theory, see my Language and Reason: a Study
of Habermas’s Formal Pragmatics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.

76. J. Habermas, ‘Wahrheitstheorien’, reprinted in his Vorstudien und Ergänzungen

zur ‘Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns’, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984.

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77. The relevant essays can be found in J. Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung,

Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999. One of these, ‘Richard Rorty’s Prag-
matic Turn’, is translated in Cooke (ed.), Habermas: on the Pragmatics of
Communication, pp. 343–82.

78. This is not a new departure. Although Habermas in his earlier writings

defended a basically epistemic view of truth as idealized rational acceptabil-
ity, he was usually also concerned to emphasize the difference between
truth and justification by drawing attention to the unconditional character
we attribute to truth. However, up to recently it was quite unclear what
kind of postmetaphysical basis could be found for our understanding of
truth as a property that cannot be lost.

79. See note 77 above.
80. From the early 1980s onwards, Habermas appeared to hold a view of truth as

idealized rational acceptability. According to this position, a proposition is
true if it could be justified under the conditions of the ideal speech situation.
Truth is a regulative idea, the anticipation of an infinite rational consensus.
In his more recent writings (see note 77 above), however, Habermas
acknowledges convincing objections to this conception.

81. There is no evidence that Habermas himself distinguishes between these

two aspects. It should be noted, therefore, that both the distinction
between, and description of the two aspects as a ‘negative’ and a ‘positive
one’, respectively, is based on my reading of his work.

82. Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung, pp. 51, 247; Habermas, ‘Rorty’s Prag-

matic Turn’, p. 358.

83. Cf. Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung, p. 293.
84. Habermas, ‘Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn’, p. 364; cf. Habermas, Wahrheit und

Rechtfertigung, p. 255.

85. Habermas, ‘Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn’, p. 372.
86. Ibid., p. 370; see also Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung pp. 52–5,

291–5.

87. The same can be said of his proposed postmetaphysical interpretation of

the negative aspect of the idea of the absolute, as expressed by the notion of
fallibility. However, I cannot pursue this matter here.

88. Habermas, ‘Rorty’s Pragmatic Turn’, p. 371.
89. Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung, p. 38.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid., p. 37.
92. J. Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking, trans. by W.M. Hohengarten,

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992, p. 15.

93. Ibid., p. 15.
94. We have seen that Horkheimer holds that justification of moral beliefs is

neither necessary nor possible. Instead he appeals to historically articulated
feelings, for example, of solidarity or of desire for happiness. Such feelings
are ‘natural facts’ requiring no justification.

95. Habermas, Texte und Kontexte, pp. 135–6.
96. Ibid., p. 133. This is theology’s dilemma; see esp. pp. 137ff.
97. Ibid., pp. 129 and 136.
98. J. Habermas, Die neue Unübersichtlichkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985, p. 52.
99. Habermas, Texte und Kontexte, p. 141.

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241

100. Ibid., pp. 141f. Originally in Postmetaphysical Thinking, p. 51.
101. Arguably, Horkheimer’s theory has no room conceptually for a notion of

specifically religious truth insofar as it fails to recognize modernity’s differen-
tiation of substantive reason into various, formally conceived, dimensions of
validity. If we accept the basic premise of Habermas’s view, which is that reli-
gious truth lays claim to validity that is of a different kind from, for example,
the validity claims raised by physics, history, the law or literature, it is easy to
agree that Horkheimer’s conception of truth is too undifferentiated to allow
for significant differences in modes of justification. Admittedly, acceptance
of Habermas’s thesis regarding the modern differentiation of reason raises
complex issues about the relationship between the moments of rationality;
in particular, it raises the question of whether these moments can be rein-
tegrated without recourse to metaphysics.

102. When conceding the possibility of religious semantic contents that cannot

be retrieved discursively, Habermas tends to suggest that the existence of
such semantic contents is doubtful (see, for example, Postmetaphysical
Thinking, p. 51, where he refers to a religious semantic content that ‘eludes
( for the time being?) the explanatory force of philosophical language and
continues to resist translation into reasoning discourses’. Emphasis added.)
A rare example of engagement with the question of religious truth can be
found in his reply to some critics at a theological conference held in 1988
at the University of Chicago (see Texte und Kontexte, pp. 127–56). Here,
Habermas argues that theology has to take seriously the validity claims of
religion – and criticizes some theologians for failing to do so. At the same
time, he acknowledges the difficulties connected with any such attempt –
without, however, indicating any solution.

103. See my Language and Reason, ch. 3. My discussion in the following draws

on the argument in this chapter.

104. Such conditions include, for example, the necessary presuppositions that

only the force of the better argument prevails, or that everyone concerned
is entitled to participate on an equal basis.

105. Cooke (ed.), Habermas: on the Pragmatics of Communication, pp. 320–1.
106. Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung, p. 297.
107. Habermas, Texte und Kontexte, p. 149.
108. J. Habermas, Justification and Application, trans. by C. Cronin, Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1993, pp. 1–17.

109. In ‘Realizing the Post-Conventional Self’ (Philosophy and Social Criticism,

vol. 20, no. 1/2 (1994), pp. 87–101). I argue that Habermas’s account of eth-
ical validity claims is unsatisfactory in that it fails to distinguish adequately
between two senses in which validity claims can be context-specific.
Cf. also my ‘Are Ethical Conflicts Irreconcilable?’ in Philosophy and Social
Criticism, vol. 23, no. 2 (1997), pp. 1–19).

110. Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 1, p. 42.
111. Cooke (ed.), Habermas: on the Pragmatics of Communication, p. 415. Habermas

here cites Albrecht Wellmer’s essay, ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation’, in
his The Persistence of Modernity, trans. by D. Midgely, Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1991.

112. Clearly, this contrasts with Kant’s position on the universality of aesthetic

judgements in his Critique of Judgment, trans. by W.S. Pluhar, Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Co., 1987.

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113. Habermas, Texte und Kontexte, pp. 146ff.
114. Cooke (ed.), Habermas: on the Pragmatics of Communication, pp. 396ff.
115. Ibid., p. 397.
116. Habermas, Texte und Kontexte, pp. 146–7.
117. Ibid., p. 147. Of course the same can be said of aesthetic experience.

Indeed, Wellmer – whom Habermas cites approvingly in this regard – seems
to be emphasizing precisely the holistic aspect of aesthetic experience (see
Wellmer, ‘Truth, Semblance, Reconciliation’).

118. Habermas (Texte und Kontexte, p. 140) acknowledges that this must be true

for theological claims qua validity claims. It must therefore also hold for
religious claims qua validity claims.

119. Ibid., p. 137.
120. Habermas, Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung, pp. 277–8.
121. See Cooke, ‘Between “Contextualism” and “Objectivism”: the Normative

Foundations of Social Philosophy’.

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243

244

Voices in Discussion

D.Z. Phillips

H: I have endeavoured to expound critical theory through the
developments in the work of Horkheimer. He gave this title to his the-
ory to distinguish it from orthodox Marxism. His work went through
three phases. His work during the first phase can be compared to that
of Feuerbach and Marx. Once we have thrown off its religious guise,
the essence of religion can be seen as the struggle for a better world. He
did not agree with the Leninist view that religion was an oppressive
institution. Instead, he emphasized the finitude of life, and thought
that religion saves us from a thoughtless optimism. In this he was
influenced by the pessimism of Schopenhauer.

In his second phase, Horkheimer cooperated with Adorno in a critique

of the Enlightenment, by emphasizing the negative aspects of Judaism.
The negation of optimism is not based any longer on a conception of
absolute reasoning.

In his third phase, influenced by Kant, Horkheimer is far more scep-

tical. He said that ‘the thing in itself’ is unknowable. He did not trust
human language or cognition. His notion of ‘the unconditioned’ must
be thought of in a regulative, Kantian sense. As in Kant’s First Critique
it is not an actual reality, but a necessary feature of human reasoning.
For the late Horkheimer the religious and the philosophical concept of
God is one, via the notion of justice. The hope is for a better world.

O: It is essential to recognize that critical theory is a practically oriented
philosophy, rather than a speculative theory. On the one hand,
Horkheimer thought that religion is a regressive force if people are dep-
endent on it. The better order he longed for was to be shaped by people’s
actual interests. This is the only way to overcome oppression. On the
other hand, religion can have real dignity if it comes out from

D.Z. Phillips

245

the midst of this oppression and furthers progressive interests. But
Horkheimer thought that this link was contingent, since, like all idealist
philosophies, religious concepts can mean anything. So religion is
replaceable. The better order does not need an appeal to the absolute.
It may have an important role at a certain time in history, but, again,
this is contingent. Furthermore, its promise of salvation is an illusion
and turns us away from the practical problems that need to be
addressed. We need to be released from the doctrinal and institutional
aspects of religion. Idealists and materialists alike need to recognize
that an appeal to the absolute cannot be maintained. At last,
Horkheimer sees the value of religion as a call for never-ending change,
but he is ambivalent towards it since its value will always depend on
circumstances.

Habermas thought that Horkheimer was more positive towards reli-

gion. He accuses him of utopianism and of turning away from the
important issues. Habermas does not think that social action needs
philosophical justification. Despite a common aim their purposes differ,
but I shall concentrate on what Habermas says about their convergence.

Habermas has an idea of truth which is pragmatic and yet absolute

in that it calls one beyond the present situation. No closure is possible.
But this role is not religious. He is also interested in the semantic
content of religion, and argues that its moral ideas are independent of
their religious form. Reason is differentiated in different modes of
reasoning. Therefore, we need a methodological atheism to deal with reli-
gion. Habermas thought that this critique has been concluded and that
the hope lies in a universal human ethics. Lately, however, Habermas has
changed his mind and said that this critique has not been fulfilled and
that it may not be possible to capture religious truths in some philo-
sophical form equivalent to them.

Can Habermas accommodate religious truth? The difficulty lies in

his theory of validated claims. He argued that while empirical and
moral claims can be vindicated in discourse, this cannot be said of
aesthetic and religious claims.

Habermas said that certain aesthetic and ethical claims are specific in

content, being dependent on cultural values. But he also recognized that
art and literature can open up new worlds, but must be experienced to
be understood. The conditions for vindication here are impossibly high,
since all people would have to see the world in the same way. So it is in
religion – it offers a world-view. But there are important differences.
There are no experts in religion as there are in aesthetics. It concerns
the everyday world. The trouble with philosophical arguments is that

they negate the existential import of religion. The value of religion is
not confined to the individual, but is universal in its aspiration.

Yet, there is a problem, since, obviously, theology cannot adopt

methodological atheism. How is religious truth to be vindicated in dis-
course? As far as I can see there are only two possible ways ahead for
Habermas in this respect. First, he can retain his criteria of vindication
and try to subsume religion under them. Second, he should revise his
criteria of vindication and make them more flexible to accommodate
different modes of thought. I hope this second course will be adopted.

D: You have presented two ways of assessing religion. One is to ask
whether religious claims are true. The second is to ask whether these
claims can be translated without remainder into moral or political
terms. Obviously, the latter alternative will commend itself more to
those who are non-religious.

H: I do not think one begins with religious experience. One must have
the requisite concepts to have the experience. All we mean by method-
ological atheism is a methodological approach to these concepts, so
you could say that you find it in Aquinas. But, of course, Habermas is
discussing it in the context of post-metaphysical philosophy.

C: I have a question and a puzzle which I want to address to H and O.
My question is whether Habermas has now gone further and said that
in the cultural conversation religious meanings have to be recognized
as sui generis and cannot be analysed away in other terms.

My puzzle concerns the use of ‘methodological atheism’. I can see

that it meant to deliver the enquiry from the framework of religious
idealism. But if the aim is to do justice to different modes of thought,
why is atheism privileged in that way? It should be one mode of
thought among others. The aim would be to do justice to the world in
all its variety. Once again, I thought of Wittgenstein’s ‘I’ll teach you
differences.’ Instead of ‘methodological atheism,’ why not speak of
disinterested enquiry or neutral enquiry?

H: I accept entirely what you say about ‘methodological atheism’. It is
an unfortunate term for the reasons you give and should be dropped.
As to your first question, again you are right. Habermas now recognizes
that religious content is sui generis.

O: The only thing I’d add to Habermas’s recognition of the distinctive
character of religious meanings, is the qualification that he’d wish it
was not true.

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G: You spoke of the ‘world-transforming’ experiences of aesthetics and
religion. You also said that religion does not depend on experts as aes-
thetics does, and that its claims are more universal.

Now, what if that ‘world-transforming’ experience of a religious kind

happened to a philosopher? Wouldn’t that mean that he would see all
things, including philosophy, religiously? But your method or, at least,
that of Habermas, insists that philosophy must be pluralist. So what is
being advocated is a philosophy for the non-religious.

O: The experience you talk of would have extensive implications which
could not be contained in Habermas’s system. One could not maintain
methodological atheism. Of course, in the end, everything depends on
one’s philosophy.

B: But is it simply a free-for-all as far as which philosophies are or are
not included?

H: For Horkheimer there was a criterion by which philosophy is to be
assessed, namely, whether it furthered sympathy for the oppressed.
Furthering the moral law gives the opportunity for political action. But
there is a problem once you recognize, as Habermas did, that there are
different conceptions of justice.

M: It is difficult to get people to aim for an ideal when they are victims
of oppression. The issue is how the claims of the innocent are to be
heard.

O: Horkheimer recognized that, hence his denial that there can be
closure on the call for justice. He becomes worried that any consensus
reached will, in fact, fail to recognize the sufferings of some minority.
Habermas recognizes this criticism, but chooses to disregard it.

H: Horkheimer is, in some ways, more realistic than Habermas. The
latter hopes that the universal embraces everyone. He has a transcen-
dental notion of consensus. It is a formal idea that is a precondition for
any moral dispute. It is not that we know the goal and are working
towards it, but it denies closure to the moral quest.

J: You say that it is not a theory of justice, but that it is normative
nevertheless. I do not think that will be ‘cool’ enough for C.

O: Habermas’s view is based on his notion of the normativity of lan-
guage. The precondition for community, he thinks, means that certain
implicit standards are already in place. These don’t specify how we
must act. They don’t wield power.

D.Z. Phillips

247

J: The matter seems rather schizophrenic. The method is supposed to be
neutral with respect, say, to religion, and yet it is not a neutral guide.

O: Habermas would want to argue that his methods are neutral, but that
their findings are not.

J: It also seems to me that if no instance of justice is sufficient, this is a
version of perfectionism.

S: I think that part of the difficulty comes from thinking that ‘absolute’
entails universality.

O: If it is true, he argued, it must be true for everyone and affect every
aspect of life.

S: I do not see why the fact that there are views other than my own is
sufficient in itself to make me doubt my own.

O: I agree that is the de facto situation, but I do find it difficult. If we
want to speak of absolute truth what does ‘true’ mean?

H: We must remember that Horkheimer and Habermas were influenced
by Hegel. For them, art is not subjective preference. Art is one stage at
which truth appears. This emphasis is still in Adorno. Art and music
are a kind of knowledge of the world. They are not private spheres.

O: Habermas seems to depart from this.

H: Yes and that is problematic, since you can give no account of moral
judgement if you say that the way forward is to be determined simply
by people’s interests.

Q: I read Habermas as a kind of Kantian. He argues for universality as a
regulative ideal, but what he actually looks for is different, namely, an
approximation to the good. Anyone should in principle be able to see
that and criticize it. So the aim shouldn’t be identified with anything
like the highest good.

H: I think that is correct.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Part VI

Process Thought

Process Thought

John B. Cobb, Jr

‘Process thought’ can include a wide range of philosophies and theologies.
Hegel, for example, is clearly a process thinker. But the term has been
used in recent times to refer especially to the ideas of Alfred North
Whitehead and those who have been influenced by him. In the philos-
ophy of religion, the key figure beyond Whitehead has been Charles
Hartshorne. In this essay I will limit myself to those who associate
themselves chiefly with the thought of Whitehead and Hartshorne.
This is the branch of process thought committed to cosmology or
metaphysics.

I thereby omit from consideration major schools of philosophy of

religion closely related to process thought and sometimes included
under the term. In the generation of Hartshorne, there were also Henry
Nelson Wieman, Bernard Meland and Bernard Loomer, all of whom
found much of value in Whitehead, but drew equally on other sources.
They, too, continue to be influential in the American scene. Some of
their followers are among the most articulate critics of the metaphysical
and cosmological forms of process thought that I will represent.

The accent in this group is on the empirical, the cultural and the

historical. If they are theistic at all, this feature of their thought tends
to be marginal. Criticisms of these branches of process thought are
likely to be quite different from criticisms of the school on which I will
focus. Nevertheless, there is a continuum between the two groups and
also a strong sense of relatedness in a wider context that rejects or
ignores the radical empiricism and neo-naturalism that both groups
have in common.

In order to develop a focused paper, I narrow the topic still more.

Among followers of Whitehead, some have little interest in religion.
Among those who do, some have rejected his doctrine of God. Some of

251

those who find much of value in his cosmology and metaphysics do
not want to be encumbered by any form of theism. Others want to
connect his cosmology and metaphysics to a different form of theism.
They play an important role in process thought, but to include them
here would be confusing.

There is a further difficulty in identifying the topic of this paper. Like

myself, many of the followers of Whitehead and Hartshorne are the-
ologians rather than philosophers. Of course, we face both ways.
Among theologians we are regarded as far too concerned with philo-
sophical issues. They correctly judge that for us somewhat autonomous
philosophical questions are of crucial importance for the formulations
of faith. Among philosophers, of course, we are viewed with suspicion
because of our theological commitments. They are correct that our
philosophical reflection is ultimately in the service of faith, although,
in our view, to be properly in the service of faith, such reflection
should be as open and rigorous as possible.

Whitehead’s latest works are those most influential among his current
theological and philosophical followers. By the time he wrote these, he
was out of step with the intellectual community. Both philosophers
and theologians had rejected cosmological interests in favour of more
narrowly defined disciplinary ones. Dominant streams of philosophy
had become analytic or positivistic. Theology stressed its starting point
in faith and its independence from all secular disciplines including
philosophy. Hence both philosophers and theologians criticized the
efforts of process thought to attain a coherent view of the whole that
did justice both to science and to religion.

In the effort to attain such a view, dominant formulations both in

science and theology had to be challenged. In other words, instead of
accepting the autonomy of the several disciplines, process thought
engages in criticizing their assumptions and seeking to formulate better
ones. From its point of view, most of the disciplines operate with
substantialist assumptions which, obviously, appear inadequate or
misleading to process thinkers. This means that the metaphysical
judgement of the primacy of event and relationship over substance
and attribute is central to the project. These metaphysical claims have
been pursued in a context in which, in general, both philosophers and
theologians have been anti-metaphysical.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

The most serious objections to process thought should be apparent

from this account of its programme. It pursues a project, metaphysics,
which is supposed to have been shown to be invalidated by David
Hume and Immanuel Kant and many others in the past two centuries.
It seeks a coherent, inclusive vision in a time when this has been shown
to be impossible and, perhaps, oppressive as well. It ignores and con-
fuses the boundaries between the sciences, philosophy and theology in
such a way as to deny the integrity of each. In short, it continues an
effort that has been outdated since the late eighteenth century.

Have these objections been met? Obviously, one who did not think

so would not continue a project so out of tune with one’s intellectual
surroundings. Whitehead agreed with Hume and Kant that early mod-
ern philosophy was fundamentally flawed, but he understood himself
to be providing an alternative solution to the problem, an alternative
that has been little pursued during the past two centuries.

This is not the place to develop the argument in any detail. But it

may be well to say that Whitehead’s doctrine of physical prehensions
introduces a way of thinking about causality that was not considered
by either Hume or Kant. Those of us who are convinced of the superi-
ority of the resulting understanding of causality are not persuaded by
the arguments of Humeans and Kantians that cosmological and meta-
physical thinking should be abandoned. These arguments in general
seem to be based on understandings of causality we do not share.

On the other hand, Whiteheadians have also been convinced that

the cosmology and metaphysics that are now needed are quite differ-
ent from those that were dominant in the past. Hence they have been
critical of Thomists and others who continued to defend more tradi-
tional views. The metaphysics that seems to us viable today on the
basis of the evidence of both science and religious experience, as well
as intrinsic intelligibility, is a process metaphysics. This requires quite
radical changes in the understanding of the human self and God as
well as of the natural world. Obviously, proposing major revisions
evokes criticism from those who stay closer to the tradition.

This criticism is at two levels. First, there is criticism of the whole

revisionist project. Some critics believe that the meanings of such
words as ‘God’ are clearly established in the tradition, especially,
perhaps, by St Thomas. The proper philosophical task is to debate the
intelligility of the idea and the justification for affirming that God, so
understood, exists. Process thinkers reply that the traditional doctrine
today shows internal incoherences and that it does not fit well with
moral and religious experience. To insist on maintaining it unchanged

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invites the atheism that has, in fact, been evoked in response to it. But
to leave the alternatives only as traditional philosophical theism, on
the one hand, and atheism, on the other, has appalling consequences.
Far more useful is the constructive task of thinking about what or
whom we can trust and worship today.

At this level, the process response to the criticism continues to com-

mend itself to me. But there is another level of criticism which I take
more seriously. Especially in an earlier generation, criticisms of tradi-
tional theism by process thinkers were often harsh and lacking in
nuance. Traditional theism was depicted as inflexible and monolithic.
We now know that its capacity for internal self-transformation is far
greater than we had supposed. We have learned that it contains greater
depths of insight and is subject to more fresh interpretations than we
had imagined. The substance thinking to which it is attached does not
entail all the consequences we projected upon it. There may have been
some justification for the process polemic at one time, in order to open
up the discussion of neglected issues, but today simplistic formulations
of our differences from some of the revised forms of traditional theism
are anachronistic. Differences remain, but process thought may not have
provided adequate answers to all the subtler challenges that characterize
the current discussion.

The other level of criticism is around particular doctrines of God.

These are probably the best known debates in philosophy of religion
involving process thinkers. One of these is the process doctrine of divine
mutability. Metaphysically this follows in process thought from the prin-
ciple that to be actual is both to act and to be acted upon. Every actual
entity is internally related to its entire past. If God is actual,
then God, too, prehends, and thereby incorporates, the past. As new
events occur, the past incorporated by God grows. By incorporating that
growing past, the divine experience grows, too. Growth is a form of
change; so, for God to grow in this way presupposes some kind of divine
mutability.

Process thought emphasizes that this form of mutability is compat-

ible with, indeed requires, another form of immutability. God is always
including whatever happens in the world. Perfect receptivity is immu-
tably characteristic of God. It is not God’s character that changes, but
God’s character is such that God is responsive to what happens in the
world.

Although this is a metaphysical point implicit in the primacy of

process, both Whitehead and Hartshorne understood it to have exten-
sive religious and existential importance. Hence process thinkers have

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often polemicized against the doctrine of divine immutability for reasons
that are not purely metaphysical. Because most of us are Christian, we
have also appealed to the Bible for support and have argued that if Jesus
reveals God, then God suffers with us in our suffering.

Critics have objected that this makes God over after our image. It

reduces God to finitude. The infinite cannot change. Those for whom
God is conceived as Being Itself reject the idea of God changing because
it makes no metaphysical sense. They join in the charge against process
thinkers of anthropomorphism. The object of worship must be radically
different from us, not the human writ large. Also, they believe that
a personalistic doctrine of God cannot be defended against critical
questioning.

During the period in which process theologians have been fighting

this battle primarily at the philosophical level, others have done so on
primarily Biblical and existential grounds. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Juer-
gen Moltmann are two of the most influential. The notion that God
suffers with us has become almost a commonplace in many Christian
circles. Hence, at that level, the critical objections have lessened, and
process theology, in this one instance, seems to be on the winning side.

The philosophical challenge, however, remains. For many philoso-

phers of religion the only locus in which they can affirm God is that of a
metaphysical principle that is beyond all the distinctions that character-
ize creaturely things. In their eyes, process theism treats God too much
like a creature. Indeed, in Whitehead we read that God is a ‘creature of
creativity’. Of course, that phrase is balanced by others that show how
very different God is from the other ‘creatures’ of creativity, but it is sig-
nificant nevertheless. For process thinkers God is an actuality or a being,
not creativity or Being Itself. Although Hartshorne does not make this
distinction, for him, too, metaphysical principles apply alike to God
and creatures. God’s transcendence does not have the radical meta-
physical character that many philosophical theologians have affirmed
of it. These thinkers object that such a being is not characterized by the
mystery, and does not inspire the awe and wonder that are essential to
the divine.

This objection is furthered by a certain form of religious experience

as well. As personalistic, Biblical images of God have become less and
less credible with the changing worldview, many who remain believers
have accented the radical otherness and formlessness of God. The
attractiveness of apophatic mysticism has increased. This is the way of
negation. Precisely because of its negation of all images and concepts,
it is free from many of the charges of incredibility that follow any

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positive affirmations about God. It also builds bridges to the Vedantic
tradition in India and to Buddhist practice. Those who have been
socialized in this way find the affirmations of process thinkers, at best,
a distraction. This is a serious objection.

My own response has been to build on the distinction made by

Whitehead between creativity and God. Creativity is the metaphysical
ultimate, and plays, philosophically, an analogous role in Whitehead
to Brahman in Vedanta and Emptiness in Zen. So far as I can tell,
Whitehead did not make these connections or affirm any religious
importance to the realization that we are Brahman or Empty or
instances of creativity. But it is evident from the history of religion,
that there is great importance in this realization. It is a quite different
form of religious life from the trust and worship that are more charac-
teristic of the Biblical tradition and that are directed toward One with
whom creatures have some interaction. Thus far I have found this
response to a very significant challenge satisfying.

The positing of two ‘ultimates’, in its turn, raises a whole new set of

objections. For many people ‘God’ is virtually synonymous with ‘The
Ultimate’ or ‘The Absolute’ in a way that makes the notion of two ‘ulti-
mates’ inconceivable. My response is that by ‘ultimate’ I mean only the
end of the line in some order of questioning. If we ask after material
causes, the ultimate in that line is different from the ultimate in the
line of efficient, formal or final causes. I take it that creativity is the
ultimate material cause of all that is, including God. That is, God’s
‘matter’ is creativity. But God is ultimate in all the other lines of ques-
tioning. In the Bible God is not the void or the chaos from which all
things are created. This does lead to two Gods.

A second feature of process thought is the denial that God knows

everything about the future. From the point of view of process thought,
this is not a denial of omniscience, since God knows all that is and the
probabilities of the future as well. There is nothing else to know. God
cannot know exactly what will happen in the future, since the future is
now genuinely open.

For those who defend the traditional doctrine, however, this is a

denial of omniscience, another rejection of divine perfection on the
basis of process anthropomorphism. For God not to know the future, it
is argued, cuts against prophecy and the assurance that divine promises
will be fulfilled. For some, faith is primarily the confidence that all will
come out right in the end, and for these the denial that God knows
that this will occur in the course of history is a flat rejection of faith. For
some, omniscience is an essential attribute of God, and this necessarily

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includes knowledge of the future. For them, the God of process
thought is not truly God at all.

Those who hold to a fully deterministic reading of history have no

difficulty in believing in God’s knowledge of the future. But many who
hold to omniscience in this sense, also affirm the reality and importance
of human freedom in shaping the future. In order to work out the
tension between these beliefs, some assert that from the transcendent,
divine perspective, all time already exists. Our human experience of the
radical difference between past and future applies only to our creaturely
perspective.

Clearly, this solution is not open to process thinkers. Neither is the

deterministic view of events. The uncertainty of the future, and there-
fore the impossibility of God’s knowing exactly what will occur, are
built into process metaphysics. For the most part, this is satisfying to us
religiously and existentially as well as intellectually. It unequivocally
accents the importance of human decisions in the shaping of history.

On the other hand, a real objection lies in the strength many gain

from the assurance that, despite all odds and apparent improbabilities,
in the end truth will prevail and right will be done. Process thinkers
join in singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ as an expression of hope and
determination, but we know that for others it is an expression of confi-
dence that God’s promises will be fulfilled regardless of what creatures
do. The inability to support that assurance can be painful. Those of us
who are Christian theologians recognize that there are Biblical passages
supporting an apocalyptic fulfilment of history which we must
demythologize.

The challenge is to find other ways of providing assurance. Process

thought offers several. First, there is the assurance that whatever
happens God is with us, God loves us, God accepts us, and all that we
are lives on in the divine life. Second, there is the assurance that in the
course of history all our efforts count for something, even if the particular
goals for which we strive are not attained. Third, there is the assurance
that God works with us and through us in every situation to bring
about what good there is possible, and that this introduces surprising
new hope and promise. Fourth, some process thinkers hold out the
hope for continued personal life beyond the grave.

These responses to the objection suffice for many of us. We can also

argue that maturity requires that we accept responsibility for our world
and not expect divine intervention to set things right or rescue us from
our destructive practices. But whether any of this is an adequate response
to the objection is hard to say. It is adequate for my own religious needs,

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but I cannot speak for those who find themselves in intolerable positions
of oppression.

Closely related to the revision of divine omniscience is the rejection

by process thinkers of the notion of divine omnipotence. We believe
that the doctrine of omnipotence rests on a philosophically outdated
understanding of causality, precisely the one that Hume and Kant
found indefensible. The Whiteheadian doctrine of causality as physical
prehensions cannot result in a single entity being capable of totally
controlling everything.

Causality is here understood as influence, as one entity flowing into

another and thus participating in its constitution. But every event results
from the joint inflowing of many past events. No one can displace all
the others.

Furthermore, although to a large extent an event is the product of the

joint influences of the past, it is never entirely so. There is always an
element of self-constitution as well. That self-constitution is a response
to the physical prehensions that causally inform the event, but this
response adds something, it supplements.

Finally, God’s role in each event is unique. To understand it, consider

as the event in question a momentary human experience. God is not
so much one physical influence alongside the personal past, the fresh
impulses through the sense organs, and the remainder of the body,
although God’s presence may play a role of that kind. God’s distinctive
role is that of making a creative response possible. God provides alterna-
tive possibilities for response to the physically given situation and calls
the occasion of experience to realize that possibility which, in that situ-
ation, is best. It is God’s role to give freedom to that experience and
responsibility as to how that freedom is used. Thus, whereas past events
compel us to incorporate aspects of themselves, God’s primary role is
persuasive.

The power of persuasion is very different from the power of coercion.

If it were possible to speak of the ideal limit of the power of persuasion
as ‘omnipotence’, process thinkers would be glad to appropriate this
traditional word. But we have found that the notion of omnipotence is
bound up with that of coercive power. We believe, on the other hand,
that persuasive power is the greater power. It is true that coercive power
can destroy and kill, but only persuasive power can give life, make free,
and evoke love.

Again, those of us who are Christian theologians also believe that the

revelation of God in Jesus is not of a monopoly of coercive power but
of an ideal instance of persuasive power, liberating power, empowering

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power. God’s activity in human life sets us free and calls us to respons-
bility. We find that this revision of traditional theism brings us closer
to the Bible.

Critics object that in the Bible God is depicted as ‘almighty’. Most of

this widespread assumption follows from the translation of a proper
name for God, ‘Shaddai’ as almighty. There is no justification for this
translation in the Hebrew texts. But it would be going too far to say
that the whole of the Bible is on our side. We must admit that some
of the actions attributed to God, especially in the earlier books of the
Old Testament, as well as the last book in the New Testament, imply a
controlling power that does not fit well into process thought.

There is still much work to be done on these questions. Controlling

and persuasive power cannot be wholly separated. The diverse under-
standings of divine power in the Bible have not been fully sorted out. But
much has been done, and some advantages of process thought have been
extensively displayed with regard, for example, to the problem of evil.

The most serious objection here, as in the case of the revised doctrine

of omniscience, relates to the openness of the future. For some Christians
the assurance that God has the power needed to transform all things in
the end is what is chiefly at stake in the claim that God is omnipotent.
Process thought cannot support that assurance.

The understanding of the self is another area in which process

thought profoundly revises the tradition. Even persons who are
attracted to other aspects of process thought often find themselves
unable to follow here. From the process point of view, this shows how
powerfully our language has caused us to adopt substance thinking even
when we are not conscious of doing so.

Process metaphysics requires us to recognize that the human person

is the flow of human experiences. Alternately, we may define the per-
son as the flow of human experiences in conjunction with all those
other events that make up the human body. In neither case is there
any underlying self or ‘I’ distinct from the experiences. The self or ‘I’
lies within the flow of experience.

The vast majority of Westerners habitually think of themselves,

implicitly, as the subjects of their experiences rather than as elements
within those experiences. If one spells out what is implicit, the experi-
ences are attributes of a substantial self that remains self-identical
despite changes in the experience. The self that experiences pain
in one moment is the same as the self that experiences joy in another.
A major objection to process thought is that it dissolves this substan-
tial, underlying self into the flux of experience.

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259

Have process thinkers responded adequately to this objection? If we

do not suppose that we have, then we must recognize that the basic
claim of process thought is incorrect. That has in fact led some to turn
away. Others of us find that the process view is phenomenologically
more accurate and that there are others who, independently of com-
mitment to process metaphysics, are finding this to be the case. We
take comfort in the fact that Buddhists have supported this view, lived
with it, and gained spiritually from it, for thousands of years.

This affinity of process thought with Buddhism provides another

ground of objection, this time from Christians. Is not a major differ-
ence between Buddhism and Christianity, they ask, the depreciation of
personal existence in the former and its affirmation in the latter? Does
not acceptance of the Buddhist denial of an underlying self lead to the
depreciation of personal existence? Can that be reconciled with Chris-
tianity?

My response to this has been to agree that Christians prize personal

continuity through time, along with the responsibilities that continu-
ity engenders, in ways that Buddhists ultimately do not. But Christians
need not understand this personal continuity as based on a self-identi-
cal self underlying the process. Instead, we can view each momentary
experience as maintaining continuity with a particular sequence of
predecessors, embodying them with some peculiar completeness, and
aiming at the continuation of this sequence into the future.

Phenomenologically, Buddhists do not deny that this occurs. Far

from it. They know how very difficult it is to break these connections.
But they see the spiritual gains that occur when the lack of identity
through time is fully appreciated and the present cuts off its ties to past
and future. They develop disciplines that help this to happen. Chris-
tians, on the other hand, can accent the positive values of identifying
our personal being with a particular past, taking responsibility for it,
and committing the future of this personal being. Christianity and
Buddhism then appear as complementary responses to the same meta-
physical situation rather than as metaphysically opposed traditions.

Perhaps the most serious objection to process thought is that it has
engaged too little with other philosophies. It has functioned too much
as a ghetto within the wider community. For example, it has engaged
too little with the other philosophies of religion represented in this

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conference. This is a valid objection, but our failure in this respect has
more justification than may initially be recognized.

First, process thought in the form of process theology has engaged

quite extensively with other forms of theology. By itself this has been
an absorbing task, and it has involved us secondarily in interaction
with philosophers of religion who enter the theological discussion. Of
course, even here, we have by no means engaged all forms of theology,
and certainly we have not been remarkably successful in shaping the
mind of the church!

Second, process thought is inherently transdisciplinary and interested

in interaction with thinkers in many different fields. We are interested in
the implications of our basic stance for physics and biology as well as the
social sciences. We need also to see whether developments in these fields
cut for or against our assumption of the primacy of events and relation-
ships over substances and attributes. What revisions in our cosmology
do new developments require? This too is an absorbing and never com-
pleted task.

Third, process thought points toward the importance of practice. We

believe that it has contributions to make not only to theology, but also to
the practical life of the church. We have written on Christian education,
pastoral counselling, church administration and preaching. Articulating
these contributions and trying to implement them also take a great deal
of time. Furthermore, this work in the church is only a tiny part of the
work we wish we could do in the wider society in education, in therapy,
and in political and economic life. I personally have become particularly
absorbed in the critique of economic theory and practice and have been
privileged to work with a Whiteheadian economist in this field.

Fourth, much philosophy, including philosophy of religion, seems to

operate within rather narrow disciplinary boundaries. Our belief that
the most important tasks confronting humanity are not well dealt with
in that way tends to make the discussion with philosophers less urgent
than some other conversations. Of course, there are many exceptions.

Fifth, the discussion with philosophers that would be most helpful

to us would be about the points at which our branch of thought breaks
away from the Euro-American mainstream. In this paper I have
touched on that briefly with regard to the issue of causality. If other
philosophers are willing critically to evaluate the Whiteheadian idea of
physical feelings, we will certainly benefit from their help. But our
experience has been that when we point out the Humean or Kantian
assumptions underlying the way problems are formulated in much of
recent philosophy and propose that there are better assumptions, our

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261

contribution is rarely appreciated. On the whole, process thinkers have
dealt more seriously with philosophers of other schools than they have
dealt with us.

The criticism that is most valuable to us is criticism of basic assum-

tions. For this reason the most challenging criticism that has developed
in recent decades has been directed to our social location as process
thinkers. This social location has been chiefly in the North American
university and oldline (read middle-class) church. Most process
thinkers have been males of European descent. In other words, most
process thought has taken place within the establishment. Further-
more, the effects of this location can be seen in the issues that we have
taken up and the way we have dealt with them.

This kind of criticism can be simply relativizing and disempowering.

But it need not be that. White, male process thinkers can ask, and to
some extent have asked, whether process thought as such contributed
to their preoccupation with issues posed by the dominant society or
whether this was the consequence of our general socialization into uni-
versity and church. The answer seems to be mixed. On the one hand,
abstract philosophical questioning and even theological doubts are
much more likely to take place among the privileged than among those
they oppress. That means that raising cosmological and metaphysical
questions at all does express the privileged social location of most
process thinkers. But that social location is not responsible for the way
those questions are answered. Indeed, process thinking has more ten-
dency to destabilize the establishment than simply to supply justifica-
tion for it.

Furthermore, some of the earliest stirrings of contemporary feminism

made use of process categories. Although most process thinkers are still
male, the ideas tend to cut against stereotypically masculine habits of
mind and to be much more supportive of feminism. The social loca-
tion of process thought no doubt blinded most of its advocates to this
tendency, but as we became aware of these issues, most of us have been
supportive of the feminist movement if not participants therein.

The initial encounter with Black and liberation theologians was less

friendly. The suspicions based on our social location were justified, but
the content of our affirmations was more supportive of their positions
than they realized. As we became clearer about the implications of our
own ideas and as liberationists realized that we were supportive,
alliances have to some extent replaced opposition. Fortunately for us,
from an early date a few Blacks and liberationists saw the potential of
process thinking to contribute to their ends.

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Although interactions with feminist and liberationist movements

and examination of social location are not identical with what would
be entailed in engagement with critical theory, I describe it because it is
the closest we have come on any large scale to such engagement. This
interaction has accounted, I think, for more significant changes in
process thought than any other, with the possible exception of envi-
ronmentalism. Together these have contributed both to emphasizing
engagement with real issues in the world and to the approach to that
engagement. Many of us feel that in these moves we are realizing more
fully what is practically involved in our theoretical commitments.

Our engagement with deconstructive postmodernism has been much

less. The pervasive importance of that movement in religious studies
programmes and in the American Academy of Religion have made it
impossible to ignore. The use of deconstrucive methods by feminists
and liberationists has also drawn attention to it. So most process
thinkers with religious interests have paid some attention to it.

Furthermore, there are many features of deconstruction that are con-

genial. Much of what is deconstructed in the tradition is what process
thinkers also have been trying to deconstruct with less success. This
applies, for example, to the idea of an underlying or substantial self
discussed above.

Nevertheless, there are deep differences. Deconstructive postmod-

ernism carries forward the Kantian trajectory against every form of
objectivity or realism. The natural world seems to exist only as it is
constructed by various humans. The process view that consciousness in
general and human experience as a whole arise out of natural processes
seems virtually unformulable in deconstructive terms. Furthermore,
the process project of coherent and unifying thinking is systematically
rejected both as illusory and oppressive, and Whitehead’s deconstruc-
tion of ordinary sensory experience into its two modes is ignored.

David Griffin has been the process thinker who has engaged this

form of postmodernism most vigorously. He has argued that by carry-
ing forward to its consistent conclusions the late modern project of
limiting reason and denying the intelligibility of the world, it deserves
the name most-modern rather than truly postmodern. He has pro-
posed an alternative constructive postmodernism which deconstructs
the basic metaphysics of both early and late modernity and proposes a
processive alternative. The most sustained engagement of process
thinkers with the issues of postmodernism is in Varieties of Postmodern
Theology, by David Ray Griffin, William A. Beardslee and Joe Holland
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1989).

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263

Wittgenstein’s influence in the Anglo-American philosophical scene in

the past half-century has been so extensive that it would be impossible
not to engage it in some measure. Some process philosophers, such as
George Lucas, have tried to present process ideas in such a way that they
could be understood and even appreciated inside the dominant discus-
sion. Others have complained about the linguistic turn which tends to
erect the implicit metaphysics of the English language into the ultimate
arbiter. Still others have complained that the notion of language games
can be so interpreted as to provide a space for fideism. But I am not
aware of an extended study of Wittgenstein himself by a process
thinker, with the possible exception of Nicholas Gier.

The most promising development in the dialogue with Wittgen-

steinians is the serious and friendly work of Nicholas Rescher, Process
Metaphysics. This recent effort by a participant in the philosophical
mainstream to understand and assess process thought opens the door
to a kind of interaction that has been difficult in the past. The ‘Special
Focus on Analytic Philosophy’ in a recent issue of Process Studies
(Vol. XXV) is also promising. Whether these developments can open
doors to worthwhile interaction with Wittgensteinian philosophers of
religion remains to be seen.

A good portion of the discussion of objections to process philosophy

of religion in Part I dealt with classical philosophical theism. Charles
Hartshorne devoted extensive attention to the critique of that theism,
and over the years there has been considerable response. I noted that
process thinkers such as he may be faulted for treating this tradition as
monolithic and failing to consider adequately the nuances and changes
that take place through time. This failure applies to some extent to
response to more recent philosophers of religion who continue the clas-
sical tradition of philosophical theism but often with different accents
and arguments. Nevertheless, from the perspective of process thought,
as long as they affirm such key doctrines as divine immutability and
omnipotence, the arguments that have long been trademarks of the
process tradition are relevant.

Reformed Epistemology, at least in the person of Alvin Plantinga, is a

contemporary exponent of classical theism. David Griffin gave consid-
erable attention to Plantinga’s formulations in his work on the problem
of evil. Griffin is currently dealing sympathetically with Plantinga’s
claims that science should free itself from its bondage to a materialistic
worldview and open itself to the hypothesis of God’s activity in the
world. As a process thinker, however, he objects to viewing this activity

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as external disruption, and he proposes viewing it as involvement in
each of the events that make up the history of the world.

Process theology shares with Reformed Epistemology the desire for a

coherent worldview that can be affirmed by Christians. It shares in the
denial that the now dominant worldview in science is required for the
advancement of science and in arguing for its reform. It shares in belief
that the Christian perspective can play a role in proposing ways in
which that reform can and should take place. But from the process per-
spective, Reformed Epistemology’s claim that its revelatory starting
point suffices for justifying its proposals, as long as they cannot be dis-
proved, is not justified by the fact that all thinking begins with some
presuppositions. For process thought, all proposals arise from presup-
positions, but each must be justified on its merits in the arena of public
discourse.

John B. Cobb, Jr

265

266

Process Thought – a Response
to John B. Cobb, Jr

Schubert M. Ogden

One of the merits of John Cobb’s chapter is his deft and fair-minded
delimitation of what, for his purposes, is to be understood by ‘process
thought’. Accepting his delimitation, which I have no trouble doing,
I would have to say that, if I am a ‘process thinker’ at all, I belong to
the same group of such thinkers to which he identifies himself as
belonging, that is, those who associate themselves with the thought of
Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne in their concern with
cosmology and metaphysics; who have a particular interest in religion,
and thus in philosophy of religion and philosophical theology; and
who pursue this interest, not as professional philosophers, but because
of their calling as Christian theologians. It will hardly seem strange,
then, if I also confess to sharing, to a considerable extent, the same
point of view that Cobb represents in his chapter.

Specifically, I view the place of process thought on the twentieth-

century intellectual scene in very much the same way; and I, too, would
say that the usual objections to it are explained by its clear-cut differ-
ences, formal or material, from other modes of thought in both philos-
ophy and theology that continue to be or have become more widely
influential. Formally, its theory and praxis of philosophy in a more
classical sense as comprehensive critical reflection on human existence
as such, and thus as perforce having a critico-constructive function
centrally involving metaphysics and ethics, put it decidedly at odds
with all understandings of philosophy as having only the one function
of analysis, as well as with other philosophies that are anti-, non-, or
only semi-metaphysical. Materially, its insistence that process is the
inclusive category and that God is to be treated, not as an exception to

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267

metaphysical principles, but as their ‘chief exemplification’ sets it no
less sharply over against the classical and, in many ways, still domi-
nant traditions in both metaphysics and theology.

But if I agree with Cobb’s account of the place of process thought

and of the usual objections to it, I also accept his distinction between
the two levels at which it is usually criticized and his differentiated
assessment of the extent to which process thinkers have adequately
responded to the criticisms. I, too, would say that the defence we have
made of what he calls ‘the whole revisionist project’ more or less effec-
tively meets the usual objections to it, while our responses to criticisms
of our neoclassical metaphysics and philosophical theology can very def-
initely be improved upon. One of the reasons for this, certainly, is just
the reason he gives – that we can and should be more attentive than we
have sometimes been to other revisions of classical metaphysics and
philosophical theology that, while scarcely neoclassical, are not obvi-
ously open to the same objections that have become the stock in trade
of our polemic against more traditional kinds of thought. And I can say
this without changing my judgement that some of the most deliberate
attempts, by philosophers as well as theologians, to commend some-
thing like a mediating position between classical and neoclassical types
of theism do not stand up well to careful criticism (Ogden, 1991).

As for Cobb’s discussion of particular doctrines of process thought

that are commonly criticized and his responses to the criticisms, here,
again, there is much with which I agree. In fact, I feel very close to him
in his frank admissions that there are assurances associated with tradi-
tional doctrines of God’s omniscience and omnipotence that process
thought simply cannot offer. But, then, I also find, as he does, that
process thought is by no means without its own assurances and that,
with the possibility it opens up for at last dealing with the problem of
evil, it is as satisfying religiously or existentially as it is philosophically.

Beyond all this, I can also accept most of what Cobb says in the

second part of his paper, including his specific responses to the third
question about the extent to which process thought has engaged with
the other points of view represented in the conference. Although I am
not bothered, as he is, by philosophies that operate within ‘rather
narrow disciplinary boundaries’, I do share his judgement that process
thinkers, on the whole, ‘have dealt more seriously with philosophers of
other schools than they have dealt with us’. Not only are critics of
process thought who have first taken the trouble to understand it
exceedingly hard to come by, but some of the philosophers who have
responded to it have stooped to outright parody and ridicule. In my

own work, certainly, the critical factor determining the nature and extent
of my engagement with other philosophical points of view has been my
vocation and tasks as a Christian theologian. While this has in no way
precluded entering into extensive discussion with philosophers as well as
theologians, it has definitely limited such discussion to philosophers
whose work has been significant for the theologians who have been
my primary Gesprächs-partner – not all of which work, incidentally, is
represented in the conference. In any case, my own engagement with
some of the points of view that are represented – notably, critical the-
ory and Wittgenstein – has been rather more extensive than Cobb indi-
cates to have been true of process thinkers generally.

For all my agreements with Cobb’s chapter, however, there are a num-
ber of ways in which my own point of view is different; and my guess
is that we would both judge that at least some of the differences are
not only real but important. Thus, if he can admit to sharing ‘radical
empiricism and neo-naturalism’ with the other main group of process
thinkers whose accent he describes as falling on ‘the empirical, the cul-
tural, and the historical’, I would have to speak more cautiously. What
most impresses me about this group is less their radical empiricism
than their panempiricism, their evident assumption that the only
meaningful assertions, apart from those of logic and mathematics, are
empirical or merely factual assertions. And what I understand by the real-
ity of God so radically transcends everything in nature, taken either in its
individual parts or as the collection thereof, that any characterization of
my understanding as ‘neo-naturalism’ could only lead to confusion.

It is also clear to me that, at certain points, Cobb and I have really

different understandings of philosophy, including metaphysics and
cosmology. As much as I share the general Whiteheadian view of
philosophy as the criticism of abstractions, I do not understand such
criticism, as he does, to be an alternative to accepting ‘the autonomy
of the several disciplines’. To be sure, philosophy in my view does have
a proper critico-constructive function with respect to all answers to the
existential question, religious and theological as well as philosophical;
and, to this extent, philosophy may be said to cover some of the same
ground as theology. But if this means that philosophy does indeed act
as a control on the answers of theology as well as of religion, it in no
way denies their proper autonomy; for the converse statement is
equally true: theology and religion also act as a control on philosophy’s

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answers to the same existential question. As for the autonomy of
science or the sciences, I see no reason at all why philosophy should be
thought to challenge it. Even if philosophy may quite properly criticize
presuppositions of the sciences that are philosophical rather than sci-
entific, it is logically different from the sciences and so may neither
control nor be controlled by them.

This means, of course, that I discern a view very different from my own

when Cobb talks about process metaphysics seeming ‘viable today on the
basis of the evidence of both science and religious experience, as well as
intrinsic intelligibility’. I do indeed think with Whitehead that ‘the best
rendering’ of ‘that ultimate, integral experience … whose elucidation is
the final aim of philosophy’ is ‘often to be found in the utterances of reli-
gious aspiration’ (Whitehead, 1978: 208). And so I, too, would say that
religious experience as expressed through religious utterances is very
definitely primary evidence for philosophical, and, specifically, meta-
physical and ethical reflection. But I cannot say the same for science,
even though I quite agree that the conclusions of process metaphysics,
like any metaphysics, cannot be viable in the long run unless they are
compatible with the results of scientific research.

The experience of which I understand science to be the best rendering,

at the secondary level of critical reflection and proper theory, is not the
‘ultimate, integral experience’ of ourselves and others as parts of the
encompassing whole, which I distinguish as our existential experience,
but rather our empirical experience, by which I mean our derived,
external perception of ourselves and the world by means of our senses.
There is also the difference that, whereas the assertions of science,
being properly empirical, must be at some point empirically falsifiable,
the assertions of metaphysics, and therefore of process metaphysics,
cannot be empirically falsified. In fact, strictly metaphysical assertions
cannot be factually falsified at all, because they formulate the necessary
conditions of the possibility not only of human existence, but of any-
thing whatever. On my understanding, then, to suppose that process
metaphysics even could be viable on the basis of the evidence of sci-
ence as well as of religious experience is to imply another, very differ-
ent view of metaphysics as, after all, an empirical, or quasi-empirical,
undertaking that differs from science only or primarily in the scope of
its generalizations.

I shall say more about this difference presently. But I first want to

point to a couple of others that I take to be important.

The first pertains to what Cobb speaks of as ‘the rejection by most

process thinkers of the notion of divine omnipotence’. Like other such

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thinkers – including, in some of his more recent statements, I regret to
say, even Hartshorne (Hartshorne, 1984) – Cobb so discusses this matter
as to leave the impression that the very notion of God’s omnipotence is
mistaken. There are indications, of course, that what he really objects
to is not the notion of divine omnipotence, but rather the most com-
mon way of construing this notion, or, if you will, the most common
way of talking about God’s transcendent power. According to this way,
the notion of omnipotence is bound up with talk of power as coercive,
and God is said to be capable of totally controlling everything. But for
all Cobb clearly says to the contrary, he can be fairly taken to reject not
only this particular way of talking about divine omnipotence, but any
other way of saying that God’s power over all things is the power, the
power than which none greater can be conceived. The contrast at this
point with his earlier discussion of omniscience is striking. Whereas in
that discussion he clearly explains why, from the point of view of
process thought, ‘the denial that God knows everything about the
future … is not a denial of omniscience’, there is no comparable expla-
nation in what he has to say about God’s power – to the effect that the
denial that God can totally control everything is just as little a denial
of omnipotence. My view, however, is that there can and should be
just such an explanation and that process thought at its best provides
it. Instead of making it easy for critics who allege that the God of
process theism is little more than the well-known ‘finite God’ of certain
modern philosophers and theologians, process thinkers have again and
again made clear that and why, in their understanding, the power of
God, like everything else about God, can only be spoken of in such
terms as ‘ideal’, ‘maximal’, ‘unfailing’, ‘infallible’, ‘irresistible’ – in a
word, ‘unsurpassable’. Thus Hartshorne, for one, having argued that ‘no
teleology can exclude unfortunate accidents and frustrations, for goals
have to be reached through mutiple acts of freedom, none of which can
be entirely controlled, even by God,’ goes on to add, ‘The point is not
that [God] cannot control them, but that they cannot be controlled. It
is not [God’s] influence which has limits, but their capacity to receive
influence. Absolute control of a free being, and there can be no others,
is self-contradictory’ (Hartshorne, 1962: 81). But, then, omnipotence is
not a mistake; the mistake is a merely verbal construal of omnipotence
that we have the best of reasons for rejecting even while holding that
God’s power as the all-worshipful cannot be surpassed.

The other difference is closely related in that it has to do with Cobb’s

endorsement of Whitehead’s view that ‘God is an actuality or a being,
not creativity or Being Itself.’ He refers in this connection to Whitehead’s

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271

well-known distinction between creativity and God and to his character-
izations of God as a ‘creature’, albeit a unique creature, of creativity.
But, surely, if there is anything unchallengeably problematic in White-
head’s metaphysics, it is just these characterizations – along with his
closely parallel statements that ‘God is the ultimate limitation’, and
God’s existence, ‘the ultimate irrationality’ (Whitehead, 1925: 257).

Aside from the evident self-contradiction of saying that God is ‘the

primordial creature’, or the ‘primordial, non-temporal accident’ of cre-
ativity, there is the deeper difficulty that neither God nor anything else
may be properly said to be a creature of creativity, given Whitehead’s
own use of terms. He expressly states that ‘creativity’ is his term for the
ultimate spoken of somehow in all philosophical theory, and he defines
it as referring to ‘the universal of universals characterizing ultimate mat-
ter of fact’. He is also careful to explain that the creativity thus referred
to is ‘actual in virtue of its accidents … . and apart from these accidents
is devoid of actuality’. But, then, according to ‘the general Aristotelian
principle’, or his own ‘ontological principle’, if there is no actual
entity, there is no reason, because ‘agency belongs exclusively to actual
occasions’, and ‘apart from things that are actual, there is nothing –
nothing either in fact or in efficacy’ (1978: 31, 7, 21, 40, 18). In other
words, because ‘creativity’ refers to nothing actual, but only to the
utmost of abstractions, it may not be properly said to create anything,
nor may anything, God included, be properly said to be its creature.
Thus, even given the distinction between creativity and God, the only
creators allowed for in a consistently Whiteheadian metaphysics are
God and those who, in a unique sense, may be said to be God’s crea-
tures, but not the creatures of creativity.

But quite apart from this clear implication of Whitehead’s own meta-

physical principles, Hartshorne has long since given good reasons for
saying that God is and must be not only a being, but also Being Itself, or,
as he usually puts it, ‘Process Itself’, or even ‘Creativity Itself’. On this
point, I fear, Cobb is simply wrong; for Hartshorne not only accepts the
distinction in question – repeatedly, in his many exchanges with Paul
Tillich – but also insists on it as necessary to his own understanding of
God as ‘the universal individual’. ‘God must, in spite of all difficulties’,
he says, ‘be a case under rules, he must be an individual being. However,
he must not be a mere, even the greatest, individual being; rather, he
must also in some fashion coincide with being or reality as such or in
general … . [God’s] uniqueness must consist precisely in being both
reality as such and an individual reality, insofar comparable to other
individuals’ (Hartshorne, 1967: 34 f.).

Of course, Hartshorne’s admission that God qua an individual is

insofar comparable to other individuals confirms Cobb’s claim that, for
him, too, metaphysical principles apply to God as well as to creatures.
But it is misleading to say, as Cobb does, that Hartshorne takes them to
apply ‘alike’ to God and to creatures; for nothing is more important to
his neoclasical theism – or, I may add, my own – than to insist that the
difference between God and any creature is itself a categorial, or, as
I say, a transcendental, difference. This means that God cannot be just
an exemplification, but can only be – in the most exact sense of the
words – the chief exemplification, of metaphysical principles, the dif-
ference between their meaning in this application and in every other
being not merely a finite, but an infinite difference.

How effective insisting on this is likely to be in meeting the objection

that ‘process theism treats God too much like a creature’ may obviously
be questioned. But I see no reason to question either the difference or
the importance of the difference between this way of responding to the
objection and Cobb’s.

Another more fundamental difference I, at least, judge to be more impor-
tant. In this case, however, it is a difference not only from Cobb’s point
of view, but also from that of most, although not all, process thinkers, in
the delimited sense in which I, too, am using the term. It is because of
this difference, indeed, that I signalled at the outset that whether I am a
process thinker even in this sense is not a closed question. But be this as
it may, the difference to which I refer pertains to yet another respect
in which Cobb’s view of metaphysics clearly seems to be other than
my own.

For all he says to indicate otherwise, he fully shares the same panpsy-

chist, or, as Hartshorne prefers to say, psychicalist, metaphysics that cer-
tainly appears to be implied by Whitehead’s doctrine of prehensions.
I put it this way because some of Whitehead’s formulations may be
thought free of this implication – as when he says, for example, ‘The way
in which one actual entity is qualified by other actual entities is the
“experience” of the actual world enjoyed by that actual entity, as subject’
(1978: 166). On the other hand, Whitehead asserts unequivocally that
‘the key notion’ from which construction of a metaphysical cosmology
should start is that ‘the energetic activity considered in physics is the
emotional intensity entertained in life’ (1938: 231 f.); and most of his
other formulations as well take ‘experience’ to be the explicans, not the

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explicandum, and may therefore be reasonably taken to assert or imply
the same psychicalism. In any case, Hartshorne’s espousal of this kind
of categorial metaphysics is notorious, and, so far as I can see, Cobb is
like most other process thinkers in following him in this. This means
that, as I understand it, Cobb’s view, also, is that not only God, but
anything else that is actual and comparably singular, as distinct from a
mere aggregate, is, in its own content or quality in itself, some form or
other of experience.

Of course, what is meant by ‘experience’ here is not specifically human

experience, or even animal experience more generally, but experience in
the completely generalized sense that Hartshorne calls ‘experience as
such’. In other words, the category ‘experience’ so used is supposed to
function neither literally nor merely symbolically or metaphorically,
but analogically, in that it is held to apply to all the different things to
which it is applicable even within the same logical or ontological type,
not in the same sense, but in different senses. This is why there can be
said to be many different forms of experience, ranging all the way from
that of the least actuality that can be conceived to that of the greatest –
to the experience of God.

But it is just this supposedly analogical use of ‘experience’, which is

required by the psychicalist metaphysics of most process thought,
including Cobb’s, that I find unacceptable. For reasons that I have
developed at length elsewhere, it is impossible to distinguish other than
verbally between a so-called analogical use of ‘experience’ and other
psychical terms, on the one hand, and their use merely as symbols or
metaphors, on the other (Ogden, 1984). At the same time, the meaning
of these terms when supposedly used as metaphysical ‘analogies’ can be
really distinguished from the other purely formal, literal concepts that
they necessarily presuppose only by tacitly committing the pathetic
fallacy of treating a merely local variable as cosmic or universal.

Thus, to take Whitehead’s point in the sentence quoted, one actual

entity may be said to experience another if, and only if, it is somehow
qualified by, and therefore internally related to, the other actual entity.
In this way, the purely formal, literal concept of one actual entity’s
being internally related to another is necessarily presupposed by the
meaning of one actual entity’s experiencing another on any use of
‘experience’, including its supposed analogical use. The difficulty with
any analogical use, however, is that saying, as psychicalists do, that all
actual entities ‘experience’ others then either becomes empty, saying no
more than that all actual entities are internally related to others, or else
can be taken to say more than this only by tacitly taking ‘experience’ in

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some other, less fully generalized sense, thereby committing the fallacy
in question.

My conclusion from this reasoning is that the assumption of most

process thinkers that there is a third, ‘analogical’ use of psychicalist
terms that is just as proper as their literal and symbolic uses is mistaken.
But, then, since just such an analogical use of some categorial terms,
physicalist if not psychicalist, is evidently essential to any categorial
metaphysics, I also conclude that no acceptable metaphysics can be
categorial, but must be strictly transcendental.

This is not the place, obviously, to explain adequately all that is

involved in this distinction. Suffice it to say that, whereas a categorial
metaphysics such as psychicalism or physicalism proceeds speculatively,
by generalizing the meaning of certain terms until they supposedly
become metaphysical analogies, a transcendental metaphysics dispenses
with such analogies and proceeds strictly analytically, by analyzing the
meaning of all terms with a view to explicating their necessary presup-
positions, the unconditionally necessary among which it distinguishes
as properly ‘transcendentals’. Thus if the method of a categorial meta-
physics is said to be, in Whitehead’s phrase, ‘imaginative generalization’,
the method of a transcendental metaphysics can be said to be ‘presup-
positional analysis’, or, taking such transcendentals into account, ‘tran-
scendental deduction’ (cf. Nygren).

In any case, the concepts and principles that a strictly transcendental

metaphysics seeks to explicate are purely formal, and so the terms for-
mulating them are used literally rather than symbolically. This means
that, within any of the different logical or ontological types in which
they are applicable, they are always applied in the same sense, not in dif-
ferent senses. Thus, when I say, in the terms of my neoclassical transcen-
dental metaphysics, that God is the universal individual, this is to be
understood quite literally, as meaning both that God is literally an indi-
vidual, and thus a centre of interaction with itself and other individuals
and events, and that God is literally universal, and so the individual, the
one centre whose field of interaction with self and others is unre-
stricted and which, therefore, is just as literally reality as such.

That I say God is literally an individual, however, does not imply that

I would call God literally ‘a person’. A person must indeed be literally
an individual because being a centre of interaction with self and others
is a necessary condition of the possibility of being a person, not only
literally but even symbolically. But the converse does not hold – not
even, consistently, for psychicalists, who concede when pressed that
‘person’, being by its very meaning a local variable, cannot be predicated

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of God either literally or analogically, but only symbolically or meta-
phorically. Unfortunately, this concession does not keep psychicalists
from reverting to their usual habits and continuing to use ‘person’ and
what Cobb calls ‘personalistic, Biblical images of God’ generally as
though they could be something more than symbols or metaphors.
Their justification for this, presumably, is that thought and speech
about persons, being based primarily in our original, existential experi-
ence of ourselves, others, and the whole, may indeed be held to provide
more fundamental concepts and terms for thinking and talking about
the whole than language based in our derived, empirical experience of
ourselves and the world around us. Nevertheless, once a distinctively
analogical use of personalistic language is ruled out as groundless and
improper, the only other possibility is to say candidly that God is not
literally, but only symbolically or metaphorically a person.

The virtue of a neoclassical transcendental metaphysics, however, is

that it does not undercut, but rather fully supports saying this, so that
‘only symbolically or metaphorically’ need not have the disparaging
implication that Paul Tillich, for one, so vigorously resisted. Because in
the terms of such a metaphysics God can be literally said to be the uni-
versal individual that not only unsurpassably acts on all others as well
as itself, but is also unsurpassably acted on by them, any talk of God as
a person who loves and knows self and others, and so on is symboli-
cally or metaphorically apt – as it cannot be given other metaphysical
terms in which God may be literally said to act on all others, but is just
as literally said or implied not to be acted on by them.

But if symbolic or metaphorical talk about God as personal is fully

supported by my transcendental neoclassical theism, it is in no way
required by it. Consequently, if using ‘God’ in a proper theistic sense is
deemed to require such personalistic talk, then my designation of the
universal individual integral to an adequate transcendental metaphysics
as ‘God’ is not properly theistic. In any event, taking all talk about God
as personal to be only symbolic or metaphorical obviates Cobb’s
recourse to distinguishing ‘two “ultimates” ’ as the way to take full
account of nontheistic as well as theistic religious ways of thinking and
speaking about strictly ultimate reality. What I understand Mahayana
Buddhists to refer to in distinguishing ‘dharmakaya-as-suchness’ or, for
that matter, Meister Eckhart, in distinguishing ‘deitas’, is not the mere
abstraction that ‘creativity’ can alone properly refer to, but something
eminently concrete and actual – the one strictly universal individual
that is at once the fathomless mystery and the ground of all rationality
and that, as such, is the primal source and the final end of all things.

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I should add, to obviate a possible misunderstanding that, on my

analysis, the main function of religious symbols or metaphors is in any
case not metaphysical but existential. Although religious utterances
perforce have metaphysical presuppositions and implications, but for
the truth of which they could not themselves be true, they are properly
concerned with communicating the meaning of ultimate reality for us,
as distinct from describing even symbolically or metaphorically the
structure of ultimate reality in itself. Accordingly, beyond claiming to
be authorized, finally, by ultimate reality itself, they mainly function to
express and commend a certain way of understanding ourselves and
leading our lives as parts of that reality.

As for the most serious objections to my view, I see two. The first is the

objection also made to Hartshorne’s metaphysics that to assume, as I do,
that among the necessary presuppositions of our self-understanding and
life-praxis generally are certain unconditionally necessary ones that, as
such, imply existence is to confuse necessity de dicto with necessity
de re. But so far as I am able to judge, Hartshorne’s theory of ‘objective
modality’, according to which modal distinctions on the logical level
correlate with temporal distinctions on the ontological level, effectively
meets this objection. After all, confusion is one thing, correlation, some-
thing else. And what metaphysics in my sense as well as his assumes is
not that logical necessity simply is ontological, but only that the two are
correlative – necessary existence being what is common to all possibili-
ties even as necessary propositions asserting such existence are implied
by any proposition.

The other objection is the one Hartshorne himself makes to my rejec-

tion of psychicalism and the theism that is of a piece with it. To his
mind, this rejection forces one either to accept some other much less
tenable metaphysics, that is, physicalism or dualism, or else to acquiesce
in metaphysical agnosticism. But what I reject, of course, is not simply
psychicalism, but physicalism and dualism as well, as equally unaccept-
able insofar as they, too, are categorial rather than strictly transcenden-
tal. And so far as having to settle for agnosticism is concerned, my
response is twofold. To know only that

x must be internally related to y

is indeed not to know that x must somehow experience y. But it is cer-
tainly not to know nothing about x, and so ‘agnosticism’ it clearly is not.
On the contrary, if I am right that any so-called analogical knowing is
not really knowing at all, then Hartshorne’s metaphysics, for all its
claims to know more than mine, must be equally ‘agnostic’. Moreover,
if the proper concern of metaphysics, like science, is with the structure
of things, and in the case of metaphysics, their necessary structure, then

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277

it has every reason to abstract from, and in that sense to be agnostic
about, not only their meaning for us, but also their own content or
quality in themselves.

There is one other important difference between Cobb’s point of view
and mine that has to do with the philosophy of philosophy of religion,
or, if you will, prolegomena to it. It is as clear from what he does not say
as from what he says that philosophy of religion, in his view, consists
primarily, if not entirely, in the critico-constructive task of formulating
some kind of a religious, not to say theistic, cosmology or metaphysics.
In my view, by contrast, philosophy of religion, properly so-called, either
also has or entirely consists in another purely analytic task – the task,
namely, of critically interpreting the meaning of religion, or of self-
understanding and life-praxis as explicitly mediated by religion, in the
distinctive way in which philosophy generally critically interprets the
different forms of culture and life-praxis.

That way, as I understand it, is not simply to interpret the ‘surface

meaning’ of particular expressions, as the other humanities, in their var-
ious ways, may be said to do, but to analyze the ‘deep structure’, or the
‘depth grammar’, of all the different kinds of meaning, so as thereby to
disclose their ‘tacit presuppositions’ and to map their ‘logical frontiers’.
That the impulse behind such analysis, as John Passmore insists, is ‘meta-
physical, not linguistic’ I take to be perfectly clear (Passmore: 78). But
metaphysics is one thing, philosophy something else. And as certain as
I am that philosophy does indeed have the critico-constructive task
that Cobb assigns to philosophy of religion, and that carrying out this
task centrally involves doing metaphysics as well as ethics, I would
rather distinguish this by speaking of ‘philosophical theology’. I use
‘philosophy of religion’, then, to refer to what either includes or, in the
strict sense in which I prefer to use the term, simply consists in philos-
ophy’s other essential task of analyzing the religious kind of meaning.

The issue here, obviously, is not how we are to use certain terms. The

issue is whether we are somehow to recognize the importance, if not,
indeed, the primacy of this other analytic task in our discussion of
‘philosophy of religion 2000’. As soon as we do recognize it, however,
we realize that there are some other and rather different things to be
said from the point of view of process thought from anything Cobb
has to say in his chapter.

Of course, there can hardly be such a thing as a distinctively ‘process’

way of analyzing the kind of meaning expressed by religious life and
language. In direct proportion to its adequacy, any such analysis by a
process thinker would need to agree in all essentials with any other
adequate analyses by philosophers’ working out of more or less different
points of view. Even so, process thinkers have devoted considerable time
and energy directly to the philosophical analysis of religious meaning,
and some of their contributions are, in my judgement, very much
worth taking into account.

Thus, for example, the South African thinker, Martin Prozesky,

although a philosopher rather than a Christian theologian, has interests
in process cosmology and metaphysics as well as in religion comparable
to Cobb’s or my own. But most of his work, as represented by his book,
Religion and Ultimate Well-Being: an Explanatory Theory, is concerned
with analyzing the meaning of religion and, as the subtitle indicates, is
particularly directed toward identifying the factors, cosmological as
well as anthropological, necessary to explaining religion as a form of
life and culture (Prozesky, 1984; 1986).

Or, again, I think especially of the work of William A. Christian, who

is also, in his way, something of a process thinker, as is clear already
from his early book on Whitehead’s metaphysics (Christian, 1959).
Most of his thinking and writing, however, are concerned precisely with
what he calls, in the title of probably his best known book, ‘meaning
and truth in religion’ (1964). In this book and in the two others that
followed it, Oppositions of Religious Doctrines (1972) and Doctrines of
Religious Communities (1987), Christian contributes significantly to the
purely analytic task of the philosophy of religion. Indeed, in my own
experience and reading, his clarification of the structure of religious
inquiry and of the logic of religious argument remains unsurpassed.

But still more impressive, in my judgment, is the contribution that

Hartshorne has made to this other, purely analytic task. At the heart of
his account of religious utterances is the recognition that they are, in
my sense of the term, ‘existential’, and so at once clearly different from
strictly metaphysical assertions and closely related to them. They are
different from such assertions because, arising out of personal encounter
with ‘my God’, as he likes to say, as distinct from God as such, they
either are or imply broadly factual assertions that are factually, even if
not empirically, falsifiable. At the same time, they are related to strictly
metaphysical assertions because they also imply assertions about God
as such that cannot be falsified either factually or empirically. By then
elucidating the logical connections between these strictly metaphysical

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assertions about God and other intuitively less problematic ones, such as
‘Something exists’, Hartshorne directly challenges the most fundamental
assumption made by all parties to the debate on ‘theology and falsifica-
tion’ – that, apart from the tautologies of logic and mathematics, the
only meaningful assertions are factual assertions that can be factually,
if not empirically, falsified. But more than that, he also defines a clear
alternative to other so-called functional analyses that purport to show
the meaningfulness of religious utterances without clarifying how, if at
all, their claim to truth is to be critically validated (Ogden, 1977).

These few examples will have to do to make my final point. If I am

right, they show clearly enough that process thinkers as a group, far
from having only one string to their bow, have, in their ways, con-
tributed to both of the tasks of the philosophical study of religion
2000.

Bibliography

Christian, W.A. (1959) An Interpretation of Whitehead’s Metaphysics, New Haven:

Yale University Press.

—— (1964) Meaning and Truth in Religion, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—— (1972) Oppositions of Religious Doctrines: a Study in the Logic of Dialogue

among Religions, New York: Herder and Herder.

—— (1987) Doctrines of Religious Communities: a Philosophical Study, New Haven:

Yale University Press.

Hartshorne, C. (1962) ‘The Modern World and a Modern View of God’, The

Crane Review, 4, 2: 73–85.

—— (1967) A Natural Theology for Our Time, LaSalle, IL: Open Court.
—— (1984) Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, Albany: State University

of New York Press.

Nygren, A. (1972) Meaning and Method: Prolegomena to a Scientific Philosophy of

Religion and a Scientific Theology, trans. Philip S. Watson, Philadelphia: Fortress
Press.

Ogden, S.M. (1977) ‘Linguistic Analysis and Theology’, Theologische Zeitschrift,

33: 318–25.

—— (1984) ‘The Experience of God: Critical Reflections on Hartshorne’s Theory

of Analogy’, in Existence and Actuality: Conversations with Charles Hartshorne,
eds J.B. Cobb, Jr. and F.I. Gamwell, Chicago: University of Chicago Press:
16–42.

—— (1991) ‘Must God Be Really Related to Creatures?’, Process Studies, 20, 1:

54–6.

Passmore, John (1961) Philosophical Reasoning, London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.
Prozesky, Martin (1984) Religion and Ultimate Well-Being: an Explanatory Theory,

New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Schubert M. Ogden

279

Prozesky, Martin (1986) ‘Philosophical Cosmology and Anthropology in the

Explanation of Religion’, Theoria, 66: 29–39.

Whitehead, Alfred North (1925) Science and the Modern World, New York:

Macmillan Co.

—— (1938) Modes of Thought, New York: Macmillan Co.
—— (1978) Process in Reality: an Essay in Cosmology, ed. D.R. Griffin and

D.W. Sherburne, New York: Free Press.

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Voices in Discussion

D.Z. Phillips

U: In the first three symposia we heard a lot about the relation between
religious experience and reason. I doubt whether we can generalize
about this. I was brought up in a pious Southern Methodist home in
Japan. I was socialized into Christianity. My world was theocentric.
While in the army I not only had ordinary religious experiences, but
also some dramatic ones. One of the latter was a call to be a minister.
I thought, however, that I ought to study objections to Christianity
before answering it. Most of the people I had met in the army were
Roman Catholics, as different from Southern Methodists as one could
imagine.

In the university I studied models of analysis of ideas and methods. I

was taught by Richard McKeon, who never accepted what any student
said. I kept as quiet as I could. McKeon taught the history of philoso-
phy. He put the patterns of thought of the different philosophers on
the blackboard. What emerged was a pluralist history. There was no
question of truth and falsity, but only of which pattern was most
appropriate for our day. Each system was self-contained, as though this
were a basic way of organizing thought.

I now think more in historical terms. I believe that the way the mind

works is determined by the questions people ask. The mind cannot
generate a universal, right philosophy. This reflects my attitude to what
philosophy can and cannot do. Some claim to be arguing from a neutral
position. I am not convinced. It is an Olympian height only within that
system. Philosophy cannot tell theology what to think or vice versa.

I found objections to Christianity in modern thought. But it wasn’t

so much that I found good arguments and assessed evidence, but that I
found that my former faith simply was not there. It wasn’t a matter of
choice. I could remember my former experiences, but they now made

281

belief impossible. So I experienced a shift of world-view, from a pious
one to a secular one. I lost any idea that philosophy could provide me
with a rational foundation for faith.

Then I came into contact with Charles Hartshorne, as different a

philosopher from McKeon as one could get. Understanding reality was
his life. His classes were an introduction into his conversation with
himself on these matters, one that was going on before the class started,
and continued after it ended. I was attracted to this immediately, and,
over the years, this attraction grew. I became aware that one didn’t
have to choose between different world-views. There was a third way,
one that took advances in modernity seriously – a process way of
studying reality, in which ‘becoming’ is more important than ‘being’,
and ‘events’ are more important than ‘substances’. God was now in
everything, but not in a pietistic way. I didn’t want to evaluate it too
quickly like McKeon and say ‘This is just another system.’ On the other
hand, I admit that what I go on to say is confessional. I speak as a
Process thinker.

Hartshorne emphasized arguments, but in a context where the data

seemed to support them. It depends on seeing the world in a certain
way. What attracted me was not the arguments so much as the world-
view. Is that reasonable? I won’t pursue the larger tale which would
have to be told to answer that question.

I then became aware of differences between Hartshorne and White-

head. I was learning about the latter through the former, and my
teachers were neo-naturalists. These teachers said that changes in the
twentieth century opened up the world in a new way. The process thus
revealed included human beings. They called this process ‘God’. I was
helped more by Hartshorne than by Wieman and wrote my master’s
thesis criticizing the latter in a way I would modify today. So I was
exposed to disputes within the Process family.

I find Whitehead’s speculative philosophy congenial. It is a philosophy

which advances hypotheses. You study a particular field as rigorously
as you can (although you have your presuppositions). You appreciate
some factors and then see that a full appreciation of them takes you
into another field of study. This is an endless task. It is a cosmological
task. For Whitehead, science gives us the most reliable basis for judge-
ment concerning what we are given. The subjective side of things is
explained more fully in religion.

Religion is a global phenomenon. We cannot confine ourselves in our

studies to traditional Christianity. If you look at physics, the current
theories are already loaded with presuppositions. Many of them owe

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

their form to substance-thinking. Paradoxes arise from that conceptu-
ality. So we don’t settle for present hypotheses, but check to see whether
you can arrive at better ones. This is true of religion, too, so the task is
essentially revisionist.

For Whitehead and Harthsorne, to be is to be constituted by all that

has happened in the past, and one must form oneself creatively out of
that. I find an analogy in Buddhism, with its non-substantial view of
religion. We are Johnny-come-latelys in this respect. God is the
supremely inclusive real. All that happens in the world happens in
God. This is radical interactive thinking. It could be argued that so far
from being revisionist, this is a more faithful reflection of Biblical
thought than classical theism.

E: I want to make four points on matters not said in my paper.

First, what is philosophy of religion? This involves asking, What is

philosophy? As I understand it, it is motivated by an existential question
which asks whether existence has a meaning as part of an encompassing
whole. How should we conduct ourselves given that this is our lot?
Philosophy attempts to clarify these questions.

But although philosophy is motivated by these questions, it is not

constituted by them. It is constituted by theoretical questions about
the meaning of our various practices. Reflection sees whether these are
valid. Here I am indebted to Habermas’s conception of philosophy as
critically motivated self-understanding. This is love of wisdom or
authentic self-understanding.

Philosophy has two related tasks. First, it has a purely analytic task,

that of elucidating the conditions for the possibility of self-understand-
ing. This task results in a transcendental metaphysics, because it is an
attempt to elucidate the necessary conditions of human discourse
as such. Second, it has the task of critically evaluating the various
answers which have been given to the existential question I mentioned
at the outset. I want to formulate an answer to that question. Here,
philosophy and theology have a mutual contact.

My second point arises out of my preoccupation as a Christian the-

ologian. Theology or philosophical theology is reflection on a religious
tradition. So the data here are already religious. My particular concern
is with the distinctive claims claimed to be valid by Christian witness.
Here we have to do with the claim which is specific in its content
involving a reference to Jesus Christ. This witness is possible for any
person by our common experience. So this claim necessarily involves
philosophical reflection. Christian witness is historically determined

D.Z. Phillips

283

and must be dealt with historically, but it also involves asking what
kind of meaning this witness involves. This task is not only theological,
but eminently philosophical. Are Christian claims as valid as they
claim to be? These claims are validated in the same way as we validate
other claims.

Third, given that I am a Process theologian, let me say a few things

about that. Process philosophy seems to me to be the right philosophy –
right, not because I am a Christian, but because it articulates better
than any other philosophy, the understanding of existence, and the
necessary conditions of that existence. Here I think of it as my
primary source. It continues to prove itself in my task as a Christian
theologian.

Fourth, let me indicate where I find myself at odds with most of my

fellow Process philosophers and theologians. Process thought has a
transcendental metaphysics. Because it is an answer to an existential
question it implies both a metaphysics and an ethics. Metaphysics is an
explanation of ultimate reality. But, then, it is essential not to confuse
the metaphysical conditions with factual states of affairs. This is a lesson
to be learned from Wittgenstein.

Take the example of myth. A myth is the condition of certain facts

being the case, but it is not itself a further fact. We see the trouble that
comes from treating metaphysics as a fact in the work of Thales and
other pre-Socratics. This is precisely the confusion we find in White-
head, but it persists even more in Hartshorne in his notion of a
psychicalist ontology. My own way has been to concentrate on those
questions which are of concern to everyone. We see this not only in
Kant, but also in Duns Scotus.

V: Wouldn’t you say that a general ontology and metaphysics is neces-
sary for the Christian faith, but not the categorical metaphysics we are
offered?

E: The consequence of the metaphysics we are offered so often is that it
does not recognize that God is not a fact, but the condition of the pos-
sibility of any fact. So ‘God exists’ is not a statement of fact.

A: U says that ‘becoming’ is more important than ‘being’, and that
‘events’ are more important than substances. You also say that every
event is internally related to its past. I find that wildly implausible. The
world may have started in a different way, but I can’t see that that
affects who I am. You say that this reasoning has its ancestry in Hegel,
but that doesn’t make it less criticizable.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

We have to distinguish between things. Is a table an event? It is an

instantiation of various properties. But this is not true of other things.
Am I just a bundle of feelings? If my brain is transplanted in another
person, have I survived the operation?

U: As long as you think in terms of substances and attributes you can’t
see the problem. Take an example from physics. It was thought that
the understanding of light as light waves required the postulation of
ether – there must be a substance underlying the events. There is no
ether, but people still talk of light waves. But the notion of ‘waves’
itself comes from substance-thinking. We must ask whether we can
have events without postulating substances, and some are now
retelling quantum theory from this point of view.

Now think of a moment in human experience. Antecedent moments

are functioning in that moment. When we hear a word, there is the
relation of the present to antecedent experiences. That is an internal
relation which enters into memory, perception and causality, and
which differs from postulating or thinking of an underlying ‘I’.

B: I am puzzled by E’s distinction between necessary conditions and
factuality. Are there necessary propositions that are facts? As long as a
statement is not a fact it cannot have existential import. Can’t we say
that what is necessarily true exists, but is not a fact?

M: I criticize the metaphysics out of which your question arises. I want
to re-emphasize the importance of internal relations as U did to A. For
example, it throws light on the doctrine of the Trinity. We can be
brought to see that each person of the Trinity has no identity apart
from the others.

A: That notion is congenial to me, and I have argued as much. The Son is
the Son by virtue of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is what it is by virtue
of the Father and the Son. But this is not an example of a metaphysical
truth which would hold in all cases.

D: U says in his paper, ‘It is true that coercive power can destroy and
kill, but only persuasive power can give life and evoke love.’ I do not
see this. Surely coercive or persuasive power may destroy and kill.

U: I agree the matter is more complex than the way I put it ‘Persuasive
power’ is a shorthand way of referring to something I want to empha-
size. Much of what we are at present has been determined by the past,
but there is also the possibility of the novel in the occasion. This

D.Z. Phillips

285

depends on creative responses to the possibilities which present them-
selves from the past.

C: I think that by persuasive power you mean a certain kind of power,
not the one power which may be used persuasively or coercively. I am
reminded of Kierkegaard’s remark that love cannot conquer by force.
That marks out the kind of power love has.

U: Agreed.

C: But now, correct me if I am wrong, I have heard Process theologians
speak in a way which disturbs me about God being limited in what he
can do, as though this were a limitation. But if God’s only power is the
power of love, and love cannot conquer by force (that is, that sugges-
tion does not make sense), then it is highly misleading to call that a
limitation, or to say, as some do, that God does the best he can, or that
God has good days and bad days.

U: I think the theologians you refer to are anxious to rid us of a magical
conception of power where God is concerned.

C: I understand that, and accept the negative point. It has always
seemed to me a jarring aspect of the Passion story when Jesus says that
if he wanted to he could call a legion of angels to get him off the cross.
It seems like a religious version of those bad films which end with
‘Here comes the cavalry’.

No, it is the positive account of Process theologians which worries me

when they refer to limitations in God, and so forth. If love cannot con-
quer by force, it follows that it can be rejected. At the heart of Chris-
tianity is a radical rejection of love; a rejection so severe that it involves
the one who reveals the love being deprived of an informed death, such
as that of Socrates. Instead he cries out, ‘My God, my God, why hast
thou abandoned me?’ To reveal how far love can go, Jesus becomes the
transparent vehicle for it, the price of which is his sense of abandon-
ment. I am unhappy at calling this a limitation since, rather, it is the
paradigm of the expression of what divine compassion is. So far from
being a limitation, it is said to be a full and final revelation.

I: In your autobiographical account U, you told us of how you moved
beyond your early pietism, how you came to embrace a secular per-
spective, but, then, in time, moved beyond that. You gave up your old
objectivism and practised theological praxis. Why, then, have you
come to rest in Process thought? This seems to be a final resting place.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

But, dialectically, a genuine pluralism would ask to continue struggling.
Are you still struggling?

U: That’s fine. You speak as one who is open to what is new. So you’re a
process thinker whether you like it or not. But, seriously, I’m certainly
still struggling. I want things to change. In these latter days I have
devoted more attention to economic factors than to technical issues in
philosophy and theology. There are new movements I had to come to
grips with. Feminism made me rethink many questions. But I suppose
the biggest hurdle I had to face was Black Theology. I am a descendant of
a slave-owning family who were leaders of the Confederacy. So these
matters were painful for me. I was made to realize how many of our the-
ological categories reflect certain assumptions about White supremacy.
I could deal with Latin American economic issues far more easily than
I could face up to Black Theology. So I am still struggling. There are
movements represented in this conference, such as Postmodernism,
which I recognize as having major implications for our times. If I were a
younger man I would have attempted to address it thoroughly. So I am
not complacent at all.

D.Z. Phillips

287

288

Voices in Discussion

D.Z. Phillips

In the last discussion session graduate students addressed six questions
to some of the participants.

V: I have a question for U. When you are attracted to notions of empti-
ness in Buddhism you seem to see them as reflecting states of reality
which are truer than other states of a more substantive kind. But isn’t the
reference to ‘emptiness’ part of the grammar of a Buddhist perspective
which is one among many?

U: You may well be right, and you are certainly entitled to advance that
view. All I can say by way of reply is that in my experience the teachings
about ‘emptiness’ or the experience of it do not seem to be captured by
your suggestion.

W: I spoke of a liberating totality in liberation theology. Who is to
decide what is liberating? What one regards as liberating progress,
another may regard as decline.

I: This reference owes much to the tradition of Hegel and Marx in
which society is seen as a totality. But that totality may be oppressive
and totalitarian. Now, to the extent that there is a society at all there
will be a certain amount of agreement in language, law, customs, and
so on. But there will also be the cry of the oppressed, since some laws
may be oppressive. A philosopher reflecting on these social realities, on
the importance of tradition and consensus, can also be a political
activist who seeks to bring about changes in those laws.

X: I want to ask a related question of F. When Levinas speaks of under-
standing and responding to the other, the face of the other is the face of
the widow and the orphan. This gives the response a concrete context.

D.Z. Phillips

289

But with Derrida, the matter seems open-ended, and so chaotic. The
face of the other is any face. But what if it is the face of a killer?

F: Derrida does derive his views from Levinas. But he says that there is
no set of rules which determines these matters. There is no hospitality
without risk. It is not a formal notion. The homicidal rapist is not the
other. The other is the one who requires help.

S: As K pointed out in his paper, there are many concepts of truth in
religion. I want to ask O and H, therefore, why this point cannot be an
answer to the difficulties of Habermas’s criteria of vindication with
respect to religious belief.

O: I think the reason why I don’t want to embrace that response is that
it privatizes truth. Public vindication seems to be surrendered.

S: But, surely, you don’t think that makes it a free-for-all. There are crite-
ria which are internal to perspectives. People may take an absolute stand
on these, since, as I said before ‘absolute’ need not mean ‘universal’.

O: I agree, but the evidence would still be extremely difficult to assess.

H: I think the question shows the need for a critique of Habermas. How
do we look for a vindication of religious experience? It is not going to be
a matter of straightforward inference. This is because it brings something
which cannot be found in the world, but belongs to a notion of the lim-
its of the world. Habermas’s public criteria need to be supplemented by
inner criteria which recognize the affective character of religious belief.
These criteria will involve spiritual and ethical values. Habermas can
never arrive at these as long as he bases future progress on whatever
the interests of people happen to be.

Y: I want to ask A and K about their different notions of the relations
between belief and practice.

A: I want to distinguish between belief and practice, because what I do
about the beliefs I have is always a further question. Some beliefs are
more relevant to my purposes than others. I may learn as part of my
education that William the Conqueror invaded Britain in 1066, but
that belief may have little to do with my immediate purposes. If I
believe in God I must still decide what I am going to do about my
belief. The most natural and rational response is worship, but that is
only one response among a number to that belief.

K: I think there are important differences between beliefs. There are
thousands of empirical beliefs that I have which I am indifferent to.

They have little, if any, effect on me. With others, like belief in gravity,
I am certain and have no choice. With moral and religious beliefs it is
different again. Here, there are internal relations between belief and
practice. So I disagree with A. You can’t distinguish between a belief in
generosity and what you do about it. If I am never generous, then I
can’t be said to believe in generosity, since to believe in generosity is to
be generous. Belief in God is like this too, since its primary form is
‘trust in God’. This is what believing in God comes to.

Z: Throughout the conference we have had different views expressed
about the relation of philosophy to religion. I want to ask A, U, G and J
to say what they think philosophy can do in this context.

A: Philosophy can help religion in a number of contexts. First, it can
clarify the credal elements in religion. Second, it can assess arguments
for or against the truth of religion. Gregory of Nyssa is a model in this
respect. Third, a lot will depend on the way philosophy is practised. If
it is done with analytic rigour, philosophy can help by giving a clear
presentation of the ideas involved in religion. So although religion does
not need philosophy’s help in all contexts, it certainly does in some.

U: The strong separation of philosophy from religion is a problem of
modernity. If we look to India or China we see that philosophy is a
way of life. I prefer the ancient view to the modern alternative. I
believe philosophy can help us to say ‘Christ is Lord of all’, and that
therefore there are good philosophical reasons for saying this.

G: Philosophy can certainly help religion in meeting ad hoc objections
to it. But philosophers aren’t omnicompetent in this respect. If, for
example, someone tries to link a religious movement with economic
decline, then what I need is not a philosopher, but an economist.
Similarly, philosophers can’t tackle the problems of delinquency.

More positively, the model I am attracted to is that of Clement of

Alexandria, who saw the life of the mind, in our case philosophy, as
itself a mode of worship and thanksgiving. So to do one’s best to
display what Christ’s Lordship means for art, justice, and so forth, is, for
me, at the heart of my calling as a philosopher. On the other hand, it is
important to recognize that philosophy can’t save you.

J: I just want to re-emphasize two things I have said before. First, in
what philosophical attention asks of us in relation to the world, there
is a spiritual dimension. Second, in giving this attention there is often
a need to save religion from what philosophy has done to it. Here, we
need philosophy to overcome philosophy.

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Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century

Index

Abraham, 158, 163, 179
acquaintance

belief, 54–5
deductive arguments, 54
entities, 53
facts, 53–4

Adams, Marilyn, 22–3
Adams, Robert, 24
Adorno, Theodor W.,

art, 221, 248
Californian exile, 198
determinate negation, 199, 219
Enlightenment, 199, 244
Frankfurt School, 193
Habermas, 206–7, 221–2
Hegel, 199–200
identity, 205
materialism, 205–6
metaphysics, 205
negative dialectics, 205
positivism, 200–1
reflection and knowledge, 200

aesthetics, 230, 233–5
al-Ghazali, Abu Hamid Mohammed,

Alston, William P., 23, 40, 51–2, 65
American Academy of Religion, 263
analytical philosophy,

Continental philosophy, 17
non-theistic religion, 33
ontological arguments, 5, 35
Reformed Epistemology, 15
theistic religion, 22, 65
Wittgenstein, 16

Anselm (St),

belief, 109
contemplation, 26
existence of God, 34, 104
faith, 35
inquiry, 26–7
ontological arguments, 34–5, 110
religious framework, 35

antecedent judgements, xii, xv, 32

anthropology,

psychology, 197
religion, 50, 56

anthropomorphism, 12, 255–6
apologetic arguments, 24–6, 33
apophatics, 168, 174, 255
Aquinas, Thomas (St),

deductive arguments, 6, 31
existence of God, 104, 109–10, 253
faith, 25, 32
first principles, 36
methodology, 246
philosophical theism, 4, 22

Aristotle,

creativity, 271
First Mover, 3
inference, 77
metaphysics, 186
moral reasoning, 33

art, 200, 221, 233–4, 248
atheism,

atrocities, 205
intellectual passivity, 214
Marxism, 198
metaphysics, 254
methodological atheism, 230, 235,

246–7

philosophical theism, 5, 36
sophistication, 4, 26
theism compared, 204
Wittgensteinianism, 48, 88

Atonement, 23–4
Audi, Robert, 78
Augustine of Hippo (St),

belief, 56
Confessions, 159
contemplation, 26
Derrida, 159–60
faith, 42, 49, 85
love of God, 174

Austin, John Langsham, 164
Averroës, Ibn Rushd, 26
Avicenna (ibn Sina), 26

291

awareness, acquaintance with entities,

Barth, Karl, 12
basic belief,

ambiguous usage, 46–7
competing beliefs, 90
immediate belief, 45, 47, 91
mediation, 91
properly basic, 15, 45, 79–80, 86–8
warrant theory, 45, 77

basicalists,

see also Reformed Epistemology
evidence, 66
non-inferential justifiers, 67

Baudrillard, Jean, 155
Bavinck, Herman, 42
Bayes's Theorem, 7, 10, 13, 21, 32
Beardslee, William A., 263
belief,

acquaintance, 54–5
basic see basic belief
community, 136
continuity, 136
depth of ingression, 46–7
empiricism, 97, 102, 122
evaluation, modes, 57
evidentialist challenge, 48–50
folly/foolishness, 127–8
hard-wired, 50, 90
historic facts, 135
ideally formed, 53–4
immediate see immediate belief
inductive, 55
inference, 31, 34, 51, 77
justification, 73
mediate, 46, 51–2
merits see doxastic merits
metaphysics, 34, 100, 146–7
normal/ordinary/reasonable, 127–8,

130

probability, xii, xv, 7–11, 13–14, 25,

32, 97, 122

propositional content, 54–6
rational grounding, 43, 48, 56
rationality, xii, 15, 34–5
reasons, 43–4
Reformed Epistemology, 15, 27, 44
religious experience, 31

requirements, 12
testimony, 77–8
truth-relevant merits, 42–3
warrant see warrant theory
Way of Ideas theorists, 50
Wittgenstein, 44, 46–7, 100–2,

127–8, 138–9

belief formation,

excellences, 69
inference, 51
mediate/immediate processes, 52,

modes, 57

Bentham, Jeremy, 121
Berkeley, George, 33, 121
Bernstein, Richard, 182
Bible,

apocalypse, 257
Bible God, 256, 259
Epistles see Epistles
graven images, 200
NT see New Testament
OT see Old Testament
philosophical sense, 186
process thought, 255

Blanchot, 157, 161
Bloom, Allan, 156
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 163, 255
boundary, 204
Bouwsma, O.K., 48–9, 86, 89
Boyle lectures, 24
Brahman, 256
Bruce, F.D., 91
Buddhism, 256, 260, 275, 283, 288

Calvin, John,

faith, 25, 32
religious anthropology, 50, 56
religious knowing, 65

Calvin College, 40, 49, 86
Calvinians,

foundationalism, 79–80, 87
neo-Calvinism, 41–2, 48–9, 64, 85

Caputo, John D., xiii, 153–66, 167,

174, 176

Cartesian arguments, 80–1, 157–8,

199

Catholics, 66, 281
causality, 258, 261

292

Index

Cavell, Stanley, 116–17, 145, 147–8
certainty,

faith, 32, 137
fundamentalism, 167
uncertain belief, 12

choice, order in the world, 32
Chopp, Rebecca, 155
Christian, William A., 178
Christian philosophers, religious

philosophy, xii

Christian theologians,

Atonement, 23
cosmology, 3
design, 3
eschatology, 133
God's image, 12
Incarnation, 23
process thought, 252, 261, 266, 284
Trinity, 23

Christianity,

Buddhism compared, 260
Calvinism see Calvinians
Catholics, 66, 281
coherent worldview, 265
conversions, 4, 137
credibility, 175
eschatology, 133, 176–7
external criticism, 106
Horkheimer, 214
intellectuals, 42
Jesus see Jesus Christ
Judgement Day, 132–3, 146, 198
love, 286
martyrdom, 23
Methodists, 281
Nietzsche, 106, 156, 186
perfectionism, 147
Puritans, 32
reasonableness, 122
redemption, 128
reformed-Presbyterian tradition, 41
revelation of God, 255, 258
salvation, 128, 138, 245
sin, 116
suffering, 255
theism, 65
Trinity, 23, 285
witness, 283
Wittgenstein, 132–4, 137

Wittgensteinianism, 16, 103, 106

Churchill, Winston S., 89
Clarke, Samuel, 21–2, 24
classical foundationalism, 41, 45,

49–50, 52, 58

Clement of Alexandria, 42, 85, 290
Climacus, 102
Cobb, John B., xiv, xvi, 251–65,

266–73, 275, 277–8

coherentist theory, 46, 52
Coleridge, 24
community,

belief, 136
Derrida, 162, 181, 187
hospitality, 162
public interest, 181

confusion, 145, 147
contemplation,

inquiry, 26
Plato, 90
prayer, 26
Wittgenstein, 90
Wittgensteinianism, xii, xiv

Cooke, Maeve, xiii, 211–43
Copernicus, Nicolas, 81
cosmology,

Christian theologians, 3
existence of God, 110, 131
Kalam, 26
process thought, 251–2, 261–3, 268

Credulity Principle, 72
Critical Theory,

Adorno see Adorno, Theodor W.
discussion, 244–8
economic necessity, 196
Frankfurt School, 193
Habermas see Habermas, Jürgen
historical wrongs, 206
Horkheimer see Horkheimer, Max
justice, 211
knowledge, 211
metaphysics, xiii, xv
open project, 193
practical intent, 211–43
reason, 163
religion, 193–248
rival programmes, 17
truth, 211

cults, predictions, 132–3

293

Index

293

cultural studies, 155
Cupitt, Don, 17
cynicism, 204

Day, Dorothy, 163
de Boer, Jesse, 87
deconstruction,

affirmation of impossible, 160–1
concrete messianisms, 163
determinate religion, 177
faith, 175
feminism, 263
God, 169
historical urgencies, 173–4
messianic postmodernism, 159, 161
modernist critiques, 158
negative theology, 168–9
politics, 178
process thought, 263
scepticism, 145, 182
totalities, 167, 182
wholly other, 161

deductive arguments, 6, 31, 54
Deleuze, Gilles, 155, 157
democracy, 156, 172–3, 177, 179, 186
Democritus, 99–100
Derrida, Jacques,

Circumfession, 159
community, 162, 181, 187
concrete messianisms, 163
democracy, 172–3, 177, 179
determinacy, 169, 171, 174, 176–7
difference, 168–9, 171, 173, 175,

183, 186–8

discussion, 186–90
dogma, 158
ethical concerns, xv
faith, 179
hospitality, 159, 162, 164, 189
hyperousiology, 160, 168
impossible/possible, 161, 169
in-coming, 161–2
Judaism, 159–60, 163
justice, 162, 171–2, 177, 182, 188
Levinas, 158, 180, 186–7, 289
liberation theology, 187
living with other, 187
metaphysics, 186, 188
moral aporia, 181

‘my religion’, 159
negative theology, 160, 167–9
ontotheology, 168–9
openness to everything, xiii
other without history and society,

167–85

postmodernism, 48, 158–63
religion as messianic hope,

169–83

religion without religion, 158–9,

174, 176, 187, 189–90

St Augustine, 159–60
sentences, 17
singularity, 170–1, 177, 179, 182,

187

Descartes, René,

autonomous subject, 189
Cartesian arguments, 80–1, 157–8,

199

critical of given, 173

design argument, 3, 110
determinacy, 169, 171, 174, 176–7,

183

determinate negation, 199, 206–7,

212, 218–9

determinism, 257
Dewey, John, 219
dialectics,

dialectical materialism, 212–15
Enlightenment, 198–9
negative dialectics, 205

difference,

Derrida, 168–9, 171, 173, 175, 183,

186–8

postmodernism, 153–4, 156–7
Wittgenstein, xv, 188

discourse,

see also language
illogicality, 107–8
kenosis, 168
meaningfulness, 21
morality, 236
necessary conditions, xiv
negative theology, 168
postmodernism, 164–5
process thought, xiv
super-facts, xvi
theology, 235
Wittgensteinianism, xvi

294

Index

divine,

see also God
covenant, 133
mutability, 254
necessity, 136
omnipotence, 258–9, 267, 269–70
omniscience, 256–7, 259, 267
simplicity, 42

dogma,

Derrida, 158
dogmatization, 167
Horkheimer, 198
Reformed Epistemology, 44

doxastic evaluation, 58
Doxastic Ideal, 54–6
doxastic merits,

evidence, 72
foundationalism, 51–2
immediate belief, 44, 46–7, 52
natural theology, 44
non-foundationalist, 46, 51
plurality/multiplicity, 43, 68
rationality, 68

doxastic practices, 86
doxastic sickness, 69
doxastic sin, 69
Draper, Paul, 23
Duns Scotus, John, 4, 284

Eckhart, Johannes (Meister), 160,

275

Edwards, Jonathan, 21–2, 25, 27, 32
Emotion, faith, 130
empiricism,

belief, 97, 102, 122
British philosophy, 121
empirical laws, 24
epistemology, 121–2
existence of God, 109
process thought, 251, 268–9

emptiness, 256, 288
Engels, Friedrich, 195
Enlightenment,

dialectic, 198–9
morality, 230
narrow concept, 201
negation of optimism, 244
pessimism, 198
rationality, xii, 43, 153, 177

entities,

acquaintance, 53
existent things, 99–100

epistemology,

see also foundationalism
empiricism, 121–2
epistemic hookup, 73, 75
epistemic practices, 57
Kant, 203
knowledge, 121
meta-epistemology, 41, 65
psychology, 120
reformed see Reformed

Epistemology

scepticism, 201–2, 205

Epistles,

Corinthians, 12, 127–8, 135, 150
Ephesians, 82
Romans, 3, 12, 82, 140
St Augustine, 56

eschatology, 133–4, 169, 172, 176–7,

182

essentialism, 133
ethics, 171, 233, 284
Evans, C. Stephen, 27, 82
evidence,

antecedent judgements, xii, 32
basicalists, 66
communitarian relation, 72, 86
criteria, 18
cumulative effect, 31
doxastic merits, 72
existence of God, 7–8, 13, 31
inference, 66–7, 69, 76–8
Jesus Christ, 11, 66
language, 133–4
neutral evidence, xii
predictions, 132
reasons, 97–8
theistic beliefs, 66
warrant theory, 86

evidentialism,

challenge, 48–50
deficiencies, 65
foundationalism, 76, 79, 87
narrow conception, xii
persuasive argument, 32
polemical partners, 66, 76
rationality-evidentialism, 69–71, 76

Index

295

evidentialism – continued

response to Wolterstorff, 64–82
sensible evidentialism, 72–3, 75–6,

81–2

warrant theory, 73–6

evil,

evidential problem, 23
God's tzimzum, 23
greater goods, 13
moral responses, 144

existence of God,

Christian theologians, 3–4
confirmation theory, 7
cosmology, 110, 131
credal claims, 5
deductive arguments, 6, 31
empirical hypothesis, 109
evidence, 7, 8, 13, 31
Horkheimer, 205
inductive arguments, 6, 31
inference, 31, 34
logical necessity, 6, 34
natural theology, 5, 6, 7–14
objections, 11–4
ontological arguments see

ontological arguments

Protestants, 4
sophisticated arguments, 12
Wittgenstein, 98–9, 100–1

existential questions,

philosophy, xiv, 268–9
process thought, xiv, xvi, 268–9,

278

externalism, 73–6, 80–1

facts,

acquaintance, 53–4
historical, 97, 134–5
super-facts, xvi

faculties,

belief-forming, 49, 52
epistemic, 27, 34
unbelievers, 33

faith,

apologetic arguments, 24–5
certainty, 32, 137
commitment, 11–12, 25, 100, 102
deconstruction, 175
emotion, 130

justification, 103
ontotheology, 168–9
process thought, 252
seeing, xv
theoretical activity, 51
virtue, 11, 25

falsity, 146, 279
feminism, 262–3, 287
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 197, 244
fideism, 16, 103, 108, 125, 130–1
Flew, Andrew, 21
Flint, Thomas, 21–2
Foucault, Michel, 155
foundationalism,

bipartite structure definitive, 52
Calvinians, 79–80, 87
classical, 41, 45, 49–50, 52, 58
doxastic merits, 51–2
evidentialism, 76, 79, 87
evidentialist challenge, 50
mediate/immediate distinction, 46,

52, 91

non-foundationalism, 46, 51
opposition, 45–6, 49
Reformed Epistemology, 76, 87

Francis de Sales, 17
Francis of Assisi (St), 148
Freddoso, Alfred, 21–2
Frege, Friedrich, 120
Freud, Sigmund, 65, 106, 144
fundamentalism, certainty, 167

Gealy, Walford, xiii, 119–43
General Relativity (GTR), 8
Gier, Nicholas, 264
God,

see also theism
almighty, 259
anthropomorphism, 12, 255–6
Bible God, 256, 259
creativity, 256, 271, 275
deconstruction, 169
education, 138
existence see existence of God
‘God-talk’, 57, 60–62
goodness, 25
Habermas's views, 221–4, 227–9
Horkheimer's views, 197, 204–5,

211–14, 216–18, 221–4

296

Index

God – continued

incomprehensibility, 174–5
infinite power, 14
‘invisible things’, 3
love, 25
mutability, 254
name of God, 214, 220
natural laws, 23–4, 31–3
negative theology, 167–8
omnipotence, 258–9, 267, 269–70
omniscience, 256–7, 259, 267
own image, 12
person, 274–5
persuasion, 258, 285–6
physical object, 109, 138
process thought, 254–9, 269–75
properties, 8–9
reality, xiv, xvi, 89
referring to God, 58–61, 88–9
simplicity, 42
spatial object, 58–9, 61
things of God predicated, 58, 61–2
trust, probability, xv
tzimzum, 23
Whitehead's views, 255–6, 270–1
wholly other, 169–70, 186
wisdom, 128

Goethe, Johann, 219
Goldman, 80
goodness,

God, 25
Plato, 3, 156
self-interest, 11, 25

Gregory of Nyssa, 17, 35, 290
Griffin, David Ray, 263–4

Habermas, Jürgen,

Adorno, 206–7, 221–2
aesthetics, 230, 233–5
communicative rationality, 164
ethical concerns, xv
ethics, 233
evolutionary processes, 228–9
God, 221–4, 227–9
Hegel, 248
Horkheimer, 206–7, 221–7
Kant, 248
language, 206–7
metaphysics, 229

methodological atheism, 230, 235,

246–7

morality, 230
naturalism, 228
normative theory, 228–9
postmetaphysics, 223–4, 226–9, 246
pragmatism, 231–2
regulative ideal, xiii
religious meanings, xiii
self-understanding, 283
semantic contents of religion,

229–31

social life, 211
truth, xiii, 207–8, 221, 224–7,

231–7, 245, 289

unconditionality, 225–6, 229
unconditioned, 208
validity claims, 232–6
wisdom, 283

Haecker, Theodor, 197
Hart, Henk, 40
Hartmann, Nicolai, 194
Hartshorne, Charles,

discourse, xiv
divine mutability, 254
divine omnipotence, 270
falsification, 279
God, 254–5, 271–2
metaphysics, 255, 272–3, 276
objective modality, 276
ontological arguments, 22
philosophical theism, 264
process thought, 251, 266
psychicalism, 272, 284
understanding reality, 282

Hegel, Georg,

Adorno, 199–200
being, 203
critical of given, 173
determinate negation, 212
dialectics, 212–13
failure of metaphysics, 208
historical materialism, 195
Horkheimer, 195, 198–200, 212,

248

Marx, 195, 197, 201
reason, 196
totality, 288

Heidegger, Martin, 48, 173, 186, 189

Index

297

Hick, John, 21
Hinduism, 26, 256
historical beliefs, 97, 102
historical catastrophes, 173, 198, 206
historical facts/propositions, 97,

134–5

historical materialism, 195–8, 201,

205–6

Hobbes, Thomas, 121
Holland, Joe, 263
Holocaust, 173, 198
Holwerda, David, 40
Horkheimer, Max,

Californian exile, 198
Christianity, 214
corroboration (Bewährung), 218–19
critique of religion, 193, 197–8, 212
determinate negation, 199, 206–7,

212, 218–19

dialectical materialism, 212–15
dogma, 198
early work, 194, 197, 212
economic necessity, 196
Enlightenment, 198, 201, 244
epistemology, 201–2, 205
Frankfurt School, 193
God, 197, 204–5, 211–14, 216–18,

221–4

Habermas, 206–7, 221–7
Hegel, 195, 198–200, 212–13, 248
historical materialism, 195–8, 201,

205

idealism, 213, 245
justice, 213
Kant, 201, 230, 244
metaphysics, 196, 202, 253
oppression, 244–5
pessimism, 198, 201–4, 213, 244
positivism, 194, 200–1
postmodernism, 199
reason, 196, 207
reflection and knowledge, 200
religion's moral message, 215–16
scepticism, 201–5, 244
semantic contents of religion,

229–30

social contribution of religion,

212–15

social life, 211

truth, 196, 203–4, 218–20, 221,

225–6, 231

unconditioned, xiii, 208, 244
utopianism, 221–2, 245

hospitality, 159, 162, 164, 189
Hume, David,

causality, 258
Doxastic Ideal, 55
empiricism, 24, 121–2
metaphysics, 253
natural theology, 4, 21
philosophical theism, 12
scepticism, 122

Husserl, Edmund, 189, 201
Huxley, Aldous, 148
Hyman, John, 99–101, 104, 108–9,

119

hyperousiology, 160, 168
hypocrisy, 146

idealism, 213, 245
identity,

language games, 123
nonidentity, 205
postmodernism, 173
totality, 187

immediate belief,

authenticity, 88
basic belief, 45, 47, 91
doxastic merits, 44, 46–7, 52
mediate belief distinguished, 46,

51–2, 91

perception, 50
rationality, 44

impossible, 160–1, 168–9
inductive arguments, 6, 31, 54
inductive beliefs, 55
inference,

belief, 31, 34, 51, 77
epistemic adequacy, 79
evidence, 66–7, 69, 76–8
existence of God, 31, 34
inferential propositions, 67
natural inferences, 82
properly inferential, 79–80
rationality, 56
Reformed Epistemology, 76–9, 86
sensations, 90
simplicity-disposition, 81

298

Index

infinite alterity, 170–1
Ingraffia, Brian, 156, 159
inquiry, contemplation, 26
Institute for Social Research, 194
intellection, intuitional content, 53
intelligibility,

negative theology, 168
prayer, 105
Wittgenstein, 122–3, 130

internalism, 73–4, 79
introspection, intuitional content, 53
intuition, 53
Inwagen, Peter Van, 23
Irenaeus (St), 17

James, William, 27, 182, 219
Jesus Christ,

see also Christianity
Ascension, 149
divine necessity, 136
evidence, 11, 66
historical propositions, 97, 135–7
Lordship, 290
Passion, 23, 286
Resurrection, 135, 137–9, 146,

148–9, 198

revelation of God, 255, 258
suffering, 23, 255
witness, 133, 283

Judaism,

Derrida, 159–60, 163
eschatology, 176
historical claims, 135
idolatry, 146
myths, 200
name of God, 220
negative aspects, 244
philosophers of religion, 22

justice,

Critical Theory, 211
Derrida, 162, 171–2, 177, 182,

188

Horkheimer, 213
Rawls, 145

justification,

belief, 73
connotations, 74
faith, 103
morality, 230

non-inferential justifiers, 67
rationality, 75

Kant, Immanuel,

Anschauung, 53
autonomous subject, 189
causality, 258
critique of given, 173
epistemology, 203
God, 60, 86
Habermas, 248
Horkheimer, 201, 230, 244
knowledge, 115
metaphysics, 85, 203
myths, 284
natural theology, 4, 21
neo-Kantianism, 164, 194
philosophy of history, 196
rationally grounded religion, 43,

85, 172

regulative ideal, 170
truth/morality/taste, 230

Kelsen, Hans, 194
Kierkegaard, Sören Aabye,

certainty of faith, 32
Climacus, 102
Derrida, 158, 180
ethical/religious, 170–1
existence of God, 99
God, 186
love, 286
messianic postmodernism, 153, 156
passion of faith, 139
postmodernism, 186
probabilities and guarantees, 11
reason, 164
uncertain belief, 12
wholly other, 157

King, Martin Luther, 163
knowledge,

Critical Theory, 211
epistemology, 121
externalism, 74
internalism, 74
Kant, 115
religious knowing, 65
Wittgenstein, 115–6, 120–1

Kretzmann, Norman, 21
Kuyper, Abraham, 41, 65

Index

299

language,

see also discourse
assertory, 57, 60
belief, 47
context, 125
empirical/religious, 125–6, 129–30,

148

evidence, 133–4
‘God-talk’, 57, 60–2
grammatical clarity/unclarity,

114–15

Habermas, 206–7
human life, 59
intelligibility, 122–3
logic, 124–5
New Testament, 133
Reformed Epistemology, 45, 47–8,

56–7

religious gratitude, 138
symbolism, 120
theistic language, 62–3
Wittgenstein, 16, 44, 47, 111, 120,

122, 124–7, 133

Wittgensteinianism, 47, 59, 62–3

language games,

analogy, xvi
diversity, 129, 141
evidence, 133
history, 134
human pride, 140
identity, 123
morality, 131, 134
overlap, 148
post-secular discourse, 164
religious belief, 112
speaking outside, 140, 145

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 244
Levinas, Emmanuel,

autonomous subject, 189
Derrida, 158, 180, 186–7, 289
ethics/religion, 171
God, 35, 170
horror of other, 173
Plato, 186
postmodernism, 153, 186
understanding other, 288
vigilant insomnia, 174
wholly other, 157

liberation theology, 187, 262–3, 288

Locke, John,

belief, 54
empiricism, 121–2
inductive arguments, 54
knowledge, 33, 91
metaphysics, 85
rationality, 43, 80, 85
reasonableness, 122

logic,

existence of God, 6, 34
illogical discourse, 107–8
language, 124–5

logical formalism, 124, 129, 142
logical positivism,

polemical partners, 47
religious language, 48, 123
scientism, 122
theologians condemned, 123
transcendental meaning denied,

202

Vienna school, 122

Loomer, Bernard, 251
love, 25, 174, 286
Lucas, George, 264
Lucia, Isaac, 23
Lukács, Georg, 195
Luther, Martin, 17
Lutz-Bachmann, Matthias, xiii,

193–210

Lyotard, Jean-François, 164

McCarthy, Thomas, 182
McKeon, Richard, 281–2
Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), 22
Malcolm, Norman, 22, 99, 110–12,

117, 139–40, 144–5, 148

Manweiler, Robert, 40
Marion, J.-L., 35, 186
Marsden, George, 40, 51
Marx, Karl Friedrich,

critical of given, 173
determinate negation, 199
dialectical materialism, 212–13
Hegelian philosophy, 197, 201
historical materialism, 195, 201,

205

human actions, 198
reason, 196
religion criticized, 144

300

Index

Marx, Karl Friedrich – continued

secular insight, 65
totality, 288

Marxism,

atheism, 198
critical theory, 244
dogma, 198
Hegel, 195
march of history, 197

materialism,

Adorno, 205–6
dialectical materialism, 212–15
Hegel, 195
historical materialism, 195–8, 201,

205–6

Horkheimer, 195–8, 201, 205,

212–15

Marx, 195, 201, 205, 212–13
pragmatism, 196

mathematics, 24
Mavrodes, George, 40
Meland, Bernard, 251
memory, intuitional content, 53
Menzel, Christopher, 24
Messiah, 161, 189
messianic hope, 169–83
messianic politics, 177–9
messianic postmodernism, 153,

156–62

messianic time, 171
meta-epistemology, 41, 65
metaphysics,

Adorno, 205
anti-metaphysics, 252
atheism, 254
belief, 34, 100, 146–7
confusion, 147
Critical Theory, xiii, xv
Derrida, 186, 188
disputes criteria, 35
failure, 208
Habermas, 229
Hartshorne, 255, 272–3, 276
Horkheimer, 196, 202
Hume, 253
Kant, 85, 203, 253
Nietzsche, 154, 188
pessimism, 203
Plato, 186, 203

postmetaphysics, 223–4, 226–9, 246
postmodernism, xv
presence, 168
process metaphysics, 253, 257,

259–60, 269

process thought, xiv, xvi, 251–5,

262, 266, 268–9, 274–6, 284

psychicalism, 272–5, 284
rationalism, 203
realism, 49
universal, xv–xvi
Whitehead, 17, 271, 278
Wittgenstein, 100, 147, 284

methodological atheism, 230, 235,

246–7

Mill, John Stuart, 121
Mimamsakas, 26
Min, Anselm Kyongsuk, xiii,

167–85

Mitchell, Basil, 21
Molina, Luis de, 21–2
Moltmann, Juergen, 255
Moore, George Edward, 121
morality,

allegiance, 24
discourse, 236
justification, 230
moral aporia, 181
moral reasoning, 33
religion, 215–16, 230
Wittgenstein, 134

More, Henry, 22
Mulhall, Stephen, xii, xiii, 95–117,

119–21, 124–5, 127, 130, 134,
136–7, 139–42

myths, 200, 284

natural laws, 10–11, 23–4, 31–2, 33
natural theology,

abandonment/critique, 4, 21, 130
Catholics, 66
doxastic merits, 44
existence of God, 5–14
grammar of faith, 131
reason, 130–1
theistic religion, 5, 82

negative theology, 160, 167–9, 174
neo-Calvinism, 41–2, 48–9, 64, 85
neutral evidence, xii

Index

301

New Testament,

Epistles see Epistles
God, 259
historical claims, 135
language, 133
parables, 130

Newman, John Henry, 27, 82
Newton's laws, 10
Nielsen, Kai, 103, 105–7
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm,

Christianity, 106, 156, 186
competing basic beliefs, 90
corroboration, 219
democracy, 156, 186
Dionysian postmodernism, 153–6,

161

God, 154–5
metaphysics, 154, 188
perpectivalism, 154
polymorphic plurality, 186
secular insight, 65
unhealthy masochism, 106, 144

non-theistic religions, analytical

philosophers, 33

Nygren, A., 274

Oakes, Robert, 23
Ockham, William of, 22
Ogden, Schubert M., xiv, xvi, 266–80
O’Hara (Father), 109
Old Testament,

see also Bible
Abraham, 158, 163, 179
Babel, 164–5
Exodus, 135
Genesis, 12
historical claims, 135
Isaiah, 157
Leviticus, 105
prophets, 133
Psalms, 57
scapegoat rite, 105–6
‘Shaddai’, 259
Wisdom of Solomon, 3

Olympian height, xiv, 281
ontological arguments,

analytical philosophy, 5, 35
impartial reason, 31
logical necessity, 6

modal versions, 22
Plantinga, 21–2
process thought, 284
revealed religion, 131
St Anselm, 34–5, 110
‘there is no God’, 31, 34
traditional argument, 12
Whitehead, 271
Wittgensteinianism, 110

ontotheology, 168–9
oppression, 179, 182, 187, 244–5
Osiander, Andreas, 81
other,

horror of other, 173
law of the other, 158
singularity, 187
wholly other see wholly other
without history and society, 167–85

pain and suffering, 13, 23, 113–14, 255
Paley, William, 6, 24
Paris Commune, 33
Pascal, Blaise, 25, 27
Passmore, John, 277
Paul see St Paul
perception, 50, 53, 90
persuasion, 258, 285–6
pessimism,

Enlightenment, 198
Horkheimer, 198, 201–4, 213, 244
metaphysics, 203
scepticism, 203
Schopenhauer, 198, 201, 203,

205–6, 244

Pharisees, 146
Phillips, D.Z.,

introduction, xi–xvii
voices in discussion, 31–6, 85–92,

144–50, 186–90, 244–8, 281–90

Wittgensteinianism, 16, 44–6,

57–62, 103–6, 110–11

philosophical theology,

apologetic arguments, 24–6, 33
contemporary thrust, 23–4
discussion, 31–6
limits, 25
philosophical theism, 1–20
revival, 21
theistic doctrines/proofs, 23–4

302

Index

philosophy,

analytical philosophers, 14, 16–17,

22, 33

disciplinary boundaries, 261
existential questions, xiv, 268–9
nature of philosophy, xi–xii
positivism, 13, 194
science, 269
tasks, 283

Pike, Nelson, 22
Plantinga, Alvin,

analytic philosophy, 14
depth of ingression, 46
Doxastic Ideal, 56
epistemology from below, 57
evidence, 22, 66, 76–7, 86
externalism, 80
Faith and Rationality, 14–15, 40, 42,

46, 50–1, 68, 85, 87

foundationalism, 87
God and Other Minds, 40–1
logical positivism, 48
meta-epistemology, 65
ontological arguments, 21–2
perception, 50
process thought, 264
properly basic belief, 45, 86–8
rationality-evidentialism, 70–1
Reid’s influence, 49
warrant theory, 15, 51–2, 56, 77

Plato,

antecedent judgements, 32
contemplation, 90
Demiurge, 3
goodness, 3, 156
ideally formed belief, 53
metaphysics, 186, 203
Parmenides, 158
reality, xiv, xv
Sophist, 158
traditional ideologies, 173

plausibility structures, 35
Plotinus, 60–1, 157
pluralism,

doxastic merits, 43, 68
polymorphic, 186
Reformed Epistemology, 65

polemical partners,

evidentialism, 66, 76

logical positivism, 47
Reformed Epistemology, 47, 66, 76
Wittgenstein, 47

politics,

community, 181
deconstruction, 178
democracy, 156, 172–3, 177, 179,

186

messianic, 177–9
oppression, 179, 182, 187

positivism,

see also logical positivism
Adorno, 200–1
Horkheimer, 194, 200–1
philosophy, 13, 194
science, 200–1

post-structuralism, 186
postmetaphysics, 223–4, 226–9, 246
postmodernism,

convergences, 163–5
deconstruction see deconstruction
Derrida see Derrida, Jacques
difference, 153–4, 156–7
Dionysian version, 153–9, 161
discourse, 164–5
Horkheimer, 199
identity, 173
Kierkegaard, 153, 156
messianic postmodernism, 153–66
metaphysics, xv
Nietzsche, 153–6, 161
process thought, 263
Reformed Epistemology, 48
rival programmes, 17–18
truth, 17–18
universal reason, xiii

pragmatism,

corroboration (Bewährung), 218–19
deconstruction, 182
historical materialism, 196
realism, 227
truth, 187, 224, 228, 231–2, 245

prayer,

contemplation, 26
intelligibility, 105
wholly other, 170

predictions, 131–3
prescriptive revisionism, 110
presence, 53, 168–9

Index

303

Presocratics, xiv, 284
probability,

antecedent judgements, 32
arguments, efficacy, xii
belief, xii, xv, 7–11, 13–14, 25, 32,

97, 122

exact values, 7
predictions, 132
scientists, 33
sufficient, 35
trust in God, xv

process thought,

causality, 258, 261
cosmology, 251–2, 261–3, 268
deconstruction, 263
determinism, 257
discourse, xiv
discussion, 281–7
divine mutability, 254
divine omnipotence, 258–9, 267,

269–70

divine omniscience, 256–7, 259,

267

empiricism, 251, 268–9
ethics, 284
existential questions, xiv, xvi,

268–9, 278

experience, 272–3
faith, 252
feminism, 262–3, 287
God, 254–9, 269–75
liberation theology, 262–3
metaphysics, xiv, xvi, 251–5, 262,

266, 268–9, 274–6, 284

neo-naturalism, 251, 268
ontological arguments, 284
Plantinga, 264
postmodernism, 263
practice, 261
process metaphysics, 253, 257,

259–60, 269

psychicalism, 272–5, 284
Reformed Epistemology, 264–5
response to Cobb, 266–80
rival programmes, 17
social location, 262
substance, 17
suffering, 255
theology, 252, 261, 266, 284

transdisciplinary, 261
ultimate reality, xiv
Wittgensteinianism, 264, 268

proper functioning, normative

notion, xv

Protestants, existence of God, 4
Prozesky, Martin, 278
psychicalism, 272–5, 284
psychological anthropology, 197
Puritans, 32

Quantum Theory, 7
Quran, 26

Rahner, Karl, 175
rationality,

belief, xii, 15, 34–5
doxastic merits, 68
Enlightenment, xii, 43, 153, 177
immediate belief, 44
inference, 56
intellectual duty, 69
justification, 75
modernism, 153
rational grounding, 43, 48, 56
Reformed Epistemology, xii, 15–16,

43, 85

warrant theory, 15–16, 75

Ratzch, Del, 23
Rawls, John, 145
realism,

metaphysics, 49
pragmatism, 227

reality,

God, xiv, xvi, 89
Plato, xiv, xv
process thought, xiv
Reformed Epistemology, xvi
ultimate reality, xiv, xvi
understanding reality, 282

reason,

Aristotle, 33
Critical Theory, 163
Horkheimer, 196, 207
Kierkegaard, 164
Marx, 196
natural theology, 130–1
ontological arguments, 31
postmodernism, xiii

304

Index

reasonableness,

belief, 127–8, 130
Christianity, 122
predictions, 132
Wittgenstein, 127–8, 130, 132

reasons,

belief, 43–4
evidence, 97–8

recognition, 147–8
Reformed Epistemology,

analytical philosophy, 15
basicalists, 66–7
belief see basic belief
broadly understood, 42
discussion, 85–92
foundationalism, 76, 87
inference, 76–9, 86
language, 45, 47–8, 56–7
meta-epistemology, 41
narrowly understood, 42–3, 45–6,

objections, 65–6
origins, 39–40
Plantinga see Plantinga, Alvin
pluralism, 65
polemical partners, 47, 66, 76
postmodernism, 48
pre-history, 40–1, 85
process thought, 264–5
rationality, xii, 15–16, 43, 85
reality, xvi
Reformed Journal, 87
religious dogmatism, 44
religious experience, xv
religious philosophy, 64–5
rival programmes, 14–16
utility, 15
Wittgensteinianism distinguished,

48–9, 58, 61–2, 85–6, 88

Reformed-Presbyterian tradition, 41
Reid, Thomas, 49–50, 55–7, 72, 76,

82, 85, 90

religion,

see also theism
anthropology, 50, 56
Buddhism, 256, 260, 275, 283, 288
Christian see Christianity
Critical Theory, 193–248
Derrida, 158, 169–83, 187, 189–90

determinate, 177
ethics, 171
God see God
Hinduism, 26, 256
Horkheimer, 193, 197–8, 212–16,

229–30

Jewish see Judaism
Marx, 144
messianic hope, 169–83
morality, 215–16, 230
non-theistic, 33
rationally grounded religion, 43,

85, 172

religion without religion, 158–9,

174, 176, 187, 189–90

revealed, 131
semantic contents, 229–31
social contribution, 212–15
theistic, 5, 22, 33, 65–6, 82
unhealthy masochism, 106, 144
wholly other, 169
Wittgenstein, xii, 16, 46–7, 95–117,

119–43

Wittgensteinianism, xiii, 16, 58,

103, 108, 144

religious anthropology, 50, 56
religious authority, 90–1
religious belief see belief
religious controversies, 98, 109
religious dogmatism, 44
religious experience, xv, 31
religious faith see faith
religious gratitude, 138
religious knowing, 65
religious philosophy, 64–5
religious ritual, 106, 110
religious truth, 231–7, 245
Rescher, Nicholas, 164
Rhees, Rush, xvi, 88–9, 129–30
risk, non-existence of God, 11–12, 25
Rorty, Richard, 156, 189, 224
Rowe, William, 23
Russell, Bertrand, 120–1

sacrifice, obligations, 179–80
St Anselm see Anselm
St Augustine see Augustine of Hippo
St Francis of Assisi, 148
St Irenaeus, 17

Index

305

St Paul,

belief, 12
Christianity, 17
doctrinal falsity, 146
Epistles see Epistles
‘invisible things’ of God, 3
natural theology, 82
wisdom, 128

St Thomas see Aquinas, Thomas
scapegoat rite, 105–6
scepticism,

deconstruction, 145, 182
epistemology, 201–2, 205
Horkheimer, 201–5, 244
Hume, 122
pessimism, 203
sin, 140, 145, 147

Scheler, Max, 194
Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 24
scholastics, 21
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 198, 201, 203,

205–6, 244

science,

Newton's laws, 10
philosophy, 269
positivism, 200–1
postmodernism, 155–6
probability, 33
Quantum Theory, 7
scientism, 122
Whitehead, xiv, 282

Searle, John, 164, 188
secular hopes, better world, xiii
seeing, faith, xv
self-interest, goodness, 11, 25
sensations, 50, 90
Silesius, Angelus, 160
simplicity,

disposition, 81
divine simplicity, 42
plausibility, 35

sinfulness,

divine covenant, 133
freedom from sin, 106
human disposition, 116
Original Sin, 117, 140, 145
scepticism, 140, 145, 147

singularity, 170–1, 179, 182, 187
Siva, 26

Socrates, 114, 164, 286
Sokal, Alan, 155–6
soul, substance, 17, 104
Special K, 75, 79
Stalin, Joseph, 198
Stump, Eleonore, 21
suffering and pain, 13, 23, 113–14,

255

super-facts, discourse, xvi
superstition, 104, 106–7, 109–10,

146

Swinburne, Richard, xii, xv, 3–21, 23,

25–8, 91

Taylor, Mark C., 155
teleological argument, 131
Thales, 284
theism,

see also God
analytical philosophy, 22, 65
Christianity, 65
doctrines/proofs, 23–4
Hartshorne, 264
Hume, 12
language, 62–3
natural theology, 5, 82
philosophical theology, 1–20
religions, 5, 22, 33, 65–6, 82
St Thomas Aquinas, 4, 22

theology,

black theology, 287
Christian see Christian theologians
discourse, 235
liberation theology, 187, 262–3, 288
natural see natural theology
negative theology, 160, 167–9, 174
ontotheology, 168–9
philosophical see philosophical

theology

Wittgenstein, 131–7

Tillich, Paul Johannes, 60, 175, 204,

271, 275

totalitarian oppression, 179, 182
totalities,

deconstruction, 167, 182
identity, 187
liberation theology, 288

Trinity, 23, 285
trust, xv, 49

306

Index

truth,

Critical Theory, 211
Habermas, xiii, 207–8, 221, 224–7,

231–7, 245, 289

Horkheimer, 196, 203–4, 218–21,

225–6, 231

‘Janus-face’, 225, 232
postmodernism, 17, 18
pragmatism, 187, 224, 228, 231–2,

245

religious truth, 231–7, 245
truth-relevant merits, 42–3
unconditionality, 225–6
Wittgensteinianism, 146

Udayana, 26
ultimate reality, process thought, xiv
universe,

beauty, 9–10
large hypothesis, 13–14
natural laws, 10–11

unobservable causes, 13
utopianism, 221–2, 245

Vedanta, 256
Vedas, 26
virtue,

faith, 11, 25
warranted belief, 27

Wainwright, William J., xii, xv, 21–30
warrant theory,

basic belief, 45, 77
cognitive facilities, 15
Doxastic Ideal, 56
entitlement, 73
evidence, 86
evidentialism, 73–6
philosophical accounts, 15, 51–2
rationality, 15–16, 75
reliabilist theories, 73
virtue, 27

Way of Ideas theorists, 50
Weil, Simone, 17
Welch, Sharon, 155
Weston, Michael, 188
Whitehead, Alfred North,

causality, 258
cosmology, 252

creativity, 256, 271
criticism of abstractions, 268
deconstruction, 263
divine mutability, 254
experience, 272–3
God, 255–6, 270–1
metaphysics, 17, 271, 278
ontological arguments, 271
physical prehensions, 253, 258, 272
process thought, 251, 266
science, xiv, 282
speculative philosophy, 282

wholly other,

see also other
deconstruction, 161
determinacy, 171, 176
God, 169–70, 186
hospitality, 162
messianic, 177
negative theology, 168, 174
paradox, 157
prayer, 170
religion, 169

Wieman, Henry Nelson, 251, 282
Winch, Peter, 88, 111–15, 117, 124,

140, 145, 148

wisdom, 128, 283
wise men, 34, 128
Wissenschaftslehre, 51, 53
Wittgenstein, Ludwig,

belief, 44, 46–7, 100–2, 127–8,

138–9

Biblical text misunderstood, 127–8
Blue and Brown Books, 129
Christianity, 132–4, 137
commitment, 100
contemplation, 90
Culture and Value, 96, 98, 100, 137
difference, xv, 188, 246
discussion, 144–50
early views, xiii, 120
eine Existenz, 99–100
epistemology, 120
existence of God, 98–101
intelligibility, 122–3, 130
interpretation of religion, 96–103
knowledge, 115–16, 120–1
language, 16, 44, 47, 111, 120, 122,

124–7

Index

307

Wittgenstein, Ludwig – continued

Lectures and Conversations, 96–7, 99,

124–9, 131–4, 144–7

logic, 120–1, 128–9
logical positivism, 47
metaphysics, 100, 147, 284
morality, 134, 140
On Certainty, 46–7, 88, 129
philosophers, 90
Philosophical Investigations, 122,

125–7, 129–31, 133–4, 141, 147

pictures, 99, 107
polemical partner, 47
predictions, 131–3
psychology, 120
reasonableness, 127–8, 130, 132
Recollections of Wittgenstein, 96
religion, xii, 16, 46–7, 95–117,

119–43

religious concepts, 97
religious interpretations, 111–17
response to Mulhall, 119–43
spiritual fervour, 111
taken for granted, 47
theology, 131–7
Tractatus, 122, 125–7, 129, 131,

137, 141, 145, 147

wisdom of the wise, 128

Wittgensteinianism,

atheism, 48, 88
belief, 47
Christianity, 16, 103, 106
contemplative character, xii, xiv
discourse, xvi
fideism, 16, 103, 108, 125, 130–1,

144

‘God-talk’, 57, 60–2
human life, 59
interpretation of religion, 103–11
language, 47, 59, 62–3
language games see language

games

methodology, 95
ontological arguments, 110
Phillips, 16, 44–6, 57–62, 103–6,

110–11

philosophy of religion, 58
process thought, 264, 268
referring to God, 88
Reformed Epistemology

distinguished, 48–9, 58, 61–2,
85–6, 88

religion immune to criticism, xiii,

103, 108, 144

rival programmes, 16–17
self-contained religion, 16
superstition, 104, 106–7, 109–10
theistic language, 62–3
truth/falsity, 146
worship, 59

Wolterstorff, Nicholas, xii, 14, 39–63,

64–6, 68, 73, 78–80

Wood, Jay, 27
worship, Wittgensteinianism, 59
Wykstra, Stephen, xii, 39, 64–84
Wynn, Mark, 14

Yankelévitch, Vladimar, 157

Zagzebski, Linda, 27
Zarathustra, 161
Zen, 256

308

Index

Document Outline

Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction
Part I. Philosophical Theism
Part II. Reformed Epistemology
Part III. Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinianism
Part IV. Postmodernism
Part V. Critical Theory
Part VI. Process Thought
Index

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